


But We Have Promises To Keep

by HelloAmHere



Series: The Woods are Lovely, Dark and Deep [4]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Found Families, Full Shift Werewolves, Hurt/Comfort, Loneliness, M/M, Telepathy, just like life, solving our emotional problems by taking on quests, tags liable to change particularly as varying degrees of intimacy are obtained, the protection of very good sisters, what could go wrong
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-02-26 14:06:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 35,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22981624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HelloAmHere/pseuds/HelloAmHere
Summary: Maybe, Louis thought, from the beginning to the end, he had always known exactly what he wanted. He had always heard it, a quiet song in his head never giving up, because it had never been a thing apart from who he was. Someone who wouldn’t stop. Someone who could walk out into the dark, seeing nothing, having little, and still looking.The undeniable, terrifying, gorgeous truth was always going to be this: that he had a heart, and that that heart wanted to live.
Relationships: Harry Styles/Louis Tomlinson
Series: The Woods are Lovely, Dark and Deep [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/944562
Comments: 93
Kudos: 141





	1. Prologue: Messages in the Night

**L. **

Louis woke up alone. Nonetheless it was a good waking up: a subtle slide into ready awareness. He was simply asleep and then awake without feeling startled by it. This was something that Louis wasn’t going to take for granted any time soon. He felt the soft, dark, chilly air of night and he smelled cedar. 

Everything smelled like cedar in the house when he stopped for long enough to notice it. Louis smelled like cedar by now, he suspected, although he couldn’t really smell himself. The soap in the bathrooms smelled like something that Lottie said was elderflower--and he'd thought _ sounds fake _ and she'd thought _ I know _. The curtains smelled just faintly of the laundry detergent that the eastern pack used, even though it was supposed to be neutral. But when did anything ever stay neutral?

Telepathy with her was like trading smiles across a kitchen. It was easy. He knew he was doing it right without needing to question it. This was potentially the first time that Louis had ever had this feeling in his only-so-far-remembered life, he thought. 

Louis sat up, arranged himself cross-legged, and pulled the blankets around his waist. The wall was cold against his back, his loose shirt just a little too thin, but the blankets were heavy and comforting. He felt awake in a definitive way, like the point at the end of a sentence. Like it was time to make the most of it even though it was hours until the real morning. But Louis was awake and he knew there was a reason, even if it was only an invisible one. 

In the middle of the night, something felt ready, different, waiting. When the world got quieter, Louis felt like his own mind got bigger. He’d been having this kind of feeling for a little while, a few weeks, the mind-turning-on feeling of rushing telepathy in his ears where no one else could hear it. Except, maybe, Lottie.

_ Hey, _ he thought gingerly, poking at the thick and molasses mental middle of his chest. And fast as thinking of it the wolf was there, real, curled up and looking at the dark. _ Blink. _He could see it all better now. There was a dresser by the door. The curtains were pulled tight against the light from across street and belted with a cord. His blankets smelled, of course, like cedar. The house was quiet, and safe, and not home. Or not home as much as he wanted it to be. But the wolf was no longer a chained thing in the middle of it all. 

Louis breathed in through his nose. He wanted to change, had been wanting it for a while, even though the moon was nowhere near a pulling state. It was starting to feel like it could slide out of him, like he might pat the top of his hair and find ears. He hadn’t tried, not since running from the inn, a moment he still couldn’t believe had really happened. Shimmering into fur and _ running, _ it had taken Louis until the next morning to even realize that he had changed _ before _the full moon, on his own. He hadn’t tried it since, but he’d been thinking about it.

_ Try talking to yourself more, _ Lottie had said for the last month during Strange Telepathy Figure It Out Lessons, _ try thinking less. _ Lottie was better than he was at the telepathy, maybe because she wasn’t so afraid of it. Her thoughts felt so confident, giving him the rules-that-weren’t-really-rules of telepathy. Lottie had made a face at the entire idea that their conversations were lessons and they were generally more like late into the night conversations carried out over take-out. Still, in Louis’ private opinion, _ lessons _. The eastern pack lived in a town with exactly five different kinds of take-out and they rotated steadily through them. Lottie liked burgers, and Louis liked ramen. 

Having Lottie now was..._ everything _ , even now, with things a little bit settled because Louis had found that he couldn’t really spend five and a half weeks feeling shock and amazement at the same fevered pitch even when the events deserved it. She was kind of a stranger and kind of a sister. _ He had a sister, _ she was real, _ another wolf, _a piece of his heart walked back from the dark. She slept in the room next door and they had a door between them. She owned a lot of boots, and not very much clothes, like Louis, and she hated eggs for their texture and she had very serious opinions about makeup and she was really, really funny, and Louis just wanted to listen to her, forever, and it was amazing that he could hear her in his head if he asked. 

Louis was trying--hard--to not be insane about it. He was also working on politely not feeling everything in every second from her but there were not the same rules when it came to them. _ We’re gonna figure this out, _Lottie would think at him, fiercely and all the time and unceasing. It had been five and a half weeks so far in this new house with this new sister, and she hadn’t yet stopped. Thinking, or existing. 

_ Why had it taken so long to find you? _

_ I don’t know _

_ Did you come here to find me? _ _  
_ _  
_ _ I think so! _

_ Was it easier, for you? _

It had been easier for Lottie. This, Louis had asked without realizing, in the first rush, the deep long hug at the train station, staring at her without speaking and both of them flooding into each other’s telepathic plane.

“Ok, yeah,” Ed had said, bemused in the background as Lottie and Louis gripped each other’s arms, and neither of them had paid attention to him at all. “I guess I should’ve known this would be weird, mind girl.”

Louis had slightly flinched but Lottie had merely thought, loud and annoyed, _ shut up Ed, _and Ed had grinned, and Louis had marveled at her--as at home as anything. She had held onto him without letting go for so long. 

Lottie told her half of the story in the efficient flash of telepathy, like a book put firmly in between his ears in its totality. The jacket sleeve version was that Lottie had been adopted into Ed’s pack when they found her miles from any civilization, a bright point of declarative light on the telepathic plane, demanding attention. She hadn’t lost her memories in any way but the usual. She had simply been too young to know what had happened to make their pack all vanish, and they hadn’t known either when they’d found her, a small wolf cub looking angry but unharmed. They’d had vague names from her babble but nothing else to go on, no real knowledge of whether there had been anyone else left, and she’d had the same hole in her heart that Louis had, with no understanding of how to fill it. And then Ed had brought back word of a lost wolf who needed a new place to stay, and Lottie had come with them because--after all--once a lost wolf, always someone searching. 

_ I should’ve looked harder _

_ No, how could you have known? _

_ Well I want to know everything about you now _

_ How can anyone not like ramen? _  
_  
It’s got egg in it! _

Louis took in another breath, a small shiver running through him at turning over the story with careful fingers one more time. He didn’t know whether it was better or worse this way, to have no more answers about his past and yet the whole entire mystery of a new person to learn. Well, that part was better, better, better. He had always held the past at a distance, after all, what else was there to do but move forward?

He breathed in cedar and streetlights and tried to make them feel more familiar than they were. It was, smells aside, at least as _ quiet _ as the inn. He felt his jaw tighten, and shook his head. No thinking about the inn. Less thinking. Moving forward meant that he was working on bridging the gap between intentional and unintentional telepathy, and he was getting better at it. _ Hey, wolf, what were you thinking? _

The recent dream rose up around him, like the wolf wanted him to know now that he wasn't so afraid. There had been something in it. _ Try to remember, _ he said, and then asked, the wolf. _ Try to remember? _

_ There had been dreams. They had been running. Life was running until it was laying, everyone exhausted in the thick rising home roots of the main tree. But this had been their life, out there, moving, and happy at the end of the day because of how complete. What a feeling of--content, that's what it was. You run and you reach the thing and you feel content, a certainty as far back as memory was a thing that had existed. Trees all around but this one was the best. This tree had seen so many things and Louis loved it, the curls of bark that he’d stuck his fingers into--when he had fingers--the soft dirt ever worn down and remade. They tread lightly around their tree. Lottie had been there, useless and tiny and perfect, too young to run. _ ** _He _ ** _ had been just old enough. _

_ And all around them a river, moving forever. Every piece in it a bright strand too vivid to look at. A river of light, a river of a thousand tangling pieces. _

Louis breathed. He felt the cold wall creep under his skin, felt his fingers flex against the blankets. That had been home, once. But home was just a dream and like all of his memories--it was only there when he didn’t look at it, and then not there anymore. 

_ That was then. But this, now: bricks rise around you. Life is hunting until it’s laying, curled up in the dark with no one around. Or at least the hope that no one is around. Cracked glass windows are intersected with black iron, wrought for panes that no longer exist. _

_ A car which is a loud noise like a tear. A hunt through the loud, loud, loud for quiet. And once in a while you catch it. You lay awake in the night and you look up into the sky that has no stars and you wonder if anyone else, out there, can see them. _

Louis blinked again. There was a dark room around him, not woods and open air, no trace of the strange windows he’d just been looking down, or the--warehouse? What was it? It had felt different, like the scampering sense of Harry’s mind, but different still from that. 

Louis looked around his room, waiting for his heart rate to decrease. There was quiet furniture, the street lamp trying to push its way inside past the curtains, the house that ached subtly inside of his joints with its comfort, and its wrongness. He was back in the present, and the telepathy was gone, a loss that was a relief this time. 

“Yo,” Lottie said. Louis jolted. She sat at the foot of his bed. Louis caught up to her presence, just mildly startled. The wolf had felt her come in.

“Oh, hi,” he said. She looked put-together all the time during the day but now, at night, she looked like a little sister. Her hair was braided and she was wearing thick flannel pajamas with a checkered print, something blue, he thought. 

"You were dreaming," she whispered. 

"Yeah," Louis said. “Could you tell? Did I wake you up?” 

Lottie lifted one shoulder. He felt the brush of her telepathy like a feather over his forehead. Nothing about it was invasive, or threatening, only soft. 

“I’m not really sure,” she said, “Let’s say yeah. I was dreaming too. I was dreaming about the woods.” 

“I’m always dreaming about the _ woods,” _Louis said with some small exasperation. 

Lottie snickered, and after a moment of hesitation he did too. 

“One track mind,” Lottie said, “For as little as you say. Still.” 

Louis looked away from her and toward the dresser, the curtains, the house that seemed to keep _ waiting _for him and he didn’t know what for. 

_ Working on it, _he thought. 

“It’s ok,” Lottie said. _ It’s always ok. _

He could feel her smile in the room, held back and still. It was very polite. He smiled back at her. They were both still learning how to have any of this at all. Her room was next to his and he liked that. 

He'd been in the house for a month and change, but sometimes Louis forgot that she wasn't a stranger at all and then sometimes she smiled, like this back at him across blankets, and he patted the pillow next to him like it was the most obvious thing in the world. 

"Come on then," Louis said. _ I guess if I’m awake, you’re awake. Aren’t you glad to have a brother. Whatever that means. _

_ Yes, _ she thought, _ YES, _ bright like a trumpet, like being shoved into a snowbank, _ yes yes yes. _

She crawled under the covers. Louis was, _ he could feel it in her mind, like something rueful, _always a little too careful with her. She noticed the hesitation. 

_ You’re ok, _her mind was fast. He flipped the blanket over her face. So was his, then. 

_ Means whatever we make it, right? _

“I’m probably supposed to tell _ you _ things are ok, being the older one,” Louis said.

“Is that what it’s like, siblings?” Lottie asked. Louis considered.

“It’s what it’s always like in the books,” he ventured, and she made a face at him, something that made his chest feel bigger on the inside, and the wolf just a little lighter.

_ You’re better than a book. _

“No one,” Louis said with some dignity, “Is better than a _ book.” _

“Well if I’m up and you’re up, so tell me your dream,” Lottie said. “Telepathy refinement waits for nobody. Let’s work on it.” 

Louis huffed through his nose and rolled his eyes, but they both knew that he was even more determined than Lottie to master the oceanic strangeness of their powers. 

"Didn’t you dream it too?" he asked. “I know I’ve been pushing loud thoughts around. It’s a marvel Ed isn’t up here complaining.” Learning telepathy was as annoying as anything else--_ I think you just have to mess it up for a while, and I’ve been doing that longer, _ Lottie had thought pragmatically on the first day, when Louis had said _ why does your mind feel like mine except so much fucking nicer? That seems unfair. _

The two of them looked at each other thoughtfully, their telepathy like an odd and totally new present still wrapped between them. Lottie lay further back on her side and he smelled...cedar and hair product that meant _ girl _and her half-gone nail polish. 

"Not that much, not until I knew you were out there," she whispered back. Talking out loud was safer, although their incredible, unique telepathy was richer. "But a little. What was your dream like?"

He thought about it. "It was beautiful," he said honestly. "And sad. And some things that felt like I’d seen them before, you know, like the woods we grew up in, I guess. But then there was--" he hesitated, thinking back. The warehouse and the cracked glass, that hadn’t been like home at all, not the green arms of tree branches. It had been industrial, and there had been an undercurrent like fear. “There were other things. It shifted into another place.” 

Lottie nodded, just listening, not pushing. Louis appreciated this immensely about her and about everything that had been this last month and a half. Across the foot between them, she stretched out a hand. Louis reached out, even though he wasn't sure that he quite knew how, and he ended up putting three of his fingertips to hers. Their hands didn’t look particularly similar, but he thought that her eyes and the way she frowned was familiar, and he wondered whether he would get past this, the cataloguing and watching and waiting for memories that would never come. 

“Time travel? Another time in memory?” she asked. Louis frowned. 

"I’ve always thought there was something stupid inside my head, something wrong with my brain,” Louis said, and hurried on before she could jump in to say anything because there was that warning flicker across her face-- “I mean, it’s fine. Not _ stupid _ stupid. I just thought, beyond the obvious. The obvious turning into a feral animal thing, the obvious--the magic. Past that, so many times it felt like things were too _ loud, _ too _ much, _and not just the way it all smelled or the not-pack, the city--”

“Ugh,” she got in finally, interrupting with uncontrolled sympathy, “I can’t believe you lived in the _ city,” _

“There are jobs in the city,” Louis pointed out. He felt like he pointed this out a lot and he got a lot of blank stares in response from the socialist wolves of the high snowy north, but whatever. He sighed, and she made a face of apology. 

“And then I got to the inn and I found out about wolves, and yet it turned out that even there I was different.” Louis stopped, the sharpness of it like catching a toe on a sharp stone. So apparently he wasn’t used to that revelation yet, even though life had been a series of revelations since Christmas, and he was _ tired. _ He didn’t like to even _ think _ about Harry, but Lottie shrugged in sympathy and he widened the thought anyway because--because, because, because, it was the middle of the night and she had listened to his dreams and she was _ here, _wasn’t she, someone like he’d never had before. 

“I know,” Lottie whispered, because Louis had filled them all in on why he’d run from the inn; Ed and Lottie together in their house living room, Ed with a tight expression on his face. Finding Lottie had been the best thing to ever happen to Louis and yet best things don’t erase the things that come before them, for some intolerable reason. 

“I know,” Lottie whispered again, and squeezed his hand. 

Louis nodded, but some stories had to be told a few times over. He sighed. 

_ It was the first place I ever belonged and I was different even from them, _ he thought at her, admitting it, and it was a _ sad _ thought, run through with sadness like a vivid thread in a fraying fabric, pulling holes where it should have mended. _ It’s hard to just let go in my mind when I keep wondering that. And it was a secret but I was wrong, it was still wrong, all the weirdness in my head was still something that they didn’t understand. It wasn’t controlled. _

“Of course it wasn’t controlled!” Lottie exploded, and Louis would’ve jumped at it except for the reassuring way her mind was still with him, like fingertips, perennially gentle. “What the fuck, fuck them, fuck the inn, fuck that guy in his dumb waffle shirt--” 

“I didn’t mean to talk about,” Louis started, and Lottie flipped a hand in the air. 

“I know, you don’t wanna talk about him, and his endless letters,” she said impatiently. Louis made a stifled sound like was like a groan, because the letters were piled up on the desk some feet away from their heads and it was a ground rule that nobody was supposed to mention them and Lottie knew it. She rolled her eyes and for some impossible reason of sibling dynamics that had not been adequately conveyed in any books he'd read, this helped_. Harry's letters were a song in the back of Louis' mind that he wasn't going to listen to right now, a winding thread of sorry sorry sorry. _He missed Harry, and he missed the inn, and it all ached. But he didn't want to talk about it.

“And I’m sorry, you don't have to in general," she said, gentle and only slightly apologizing. "But I'm going to in specific. Fuck. Whatever. He thought was wrong. With you, and your telepathy. He’s not the expert in you. What's to say that there's something weird about you? And isn’t it just as weird about me?"

Louis felt a confusing thump somewhere in the stomach region, _ pack, _the wolf thought unhappily, as confused as it had been for the last while. He breathed around it. 

“I can’t change,” Louis told her. “I don’t feel--even now--I don’t feel normal.” 

“What about any wolf’s life is _ normal?” _Lottie said. 

Louis couldn’t put it into words so he sighed, and _ shoved _the images into her mind as carefully as he could while still doing it quickly enough to not change his mind, the mental equivalent of covering his eyes with one hand while he fling a messy shelf of private thoughts, books falling off the shelves. He had never before had this way to tell anybody how he felt, not even the pack in the inn, but the mess inside of his mind had been too much for him to look directly at for so many years and he didn’t know why he couldn’t stop thinking about it now. 

_ The way that--sometimes all it takes is a sound or a light or a--it’s not even anything being wrong but everything clicks into wrongness and I just want to RUN and the way that a branch could snap and I feel like the wolf wants to lunge and it has TEETH and the teeth are strong and I could run run run forever and all it takes is a sound, the wrong sound, someone coming over my shoulder and surprising me, and the first place that I ever belonged couldn’t even tell me the truth, and you are new new new and old old old and I never never never want to leave you behind but I don’t know why I ever DID and I miss you and I don’t know how and you’re here but I don’t belong and there is. No. Pack. _

Lottie squeezed his hand, not comfortably, and yet the bite of it felt grounding, certain. He felt her nearly holding her breath. It was a lot, it was too much, it was too much for anyone to fix and he wasn’t asking that anyway. 

_ I don’t know if it will ever be a thing that can change about me _

“And I don’t care,” Lottie said, breathing out around it. "You're my brother. That means that you’re just the way that you should be."

Louis breathed. He felt, stupidly, like there were tears pressing into the back of his eyes and he didn’t want to cry in front of his little sister (that wasn’t what you were supposed to do, was it), so he rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling and just breathed. In, out, around the never-satisfied wolf in the middle of his chest. 

“And that’s amazing,” he said, finally, because it was absolutely true, because a year ago he would have chopped his own hands off for this--not just the blankets around them and the safe bed and the promise of breakfast in the morning, but ever so much more, somebody who could be _ his _like this. 

“But it still sucks sometimes,” Lottie said. 

Louis laughed, tired from the stupidity of feelings, tired with relief. “Yeah, yeah. It sucks. But we have this.”

_ This is good, _he thought, with the firm knowledge that telepathy conveyed everything there weren’t words for. Good was a very limited resource in the middle of some nights. But these nights, he always had it. 

_ This is good, _she affirmed, bright, and bright, and loud, and full of faith. 

Louis closed his eyes, and he felt Lottie scoot closer in the bed, put a hand on his elbow. He breathed. 

"We don't even remember each other, how weird is that,” Louis said.

“We're just going to have to remember everything from now on,” Lottie said, “Isn't it convenient that we can share our minds.”

Louis blinked at the ceiling, twice, three times. When he'd gotten off the train and met his brand new long lost sister, and they'd pulled each other into an impossible hug, it had felt like setting down a weight. 

“Louis,” Lottie whispered, “They didn’t _ know _ anything about us, our telepathy. They were wrong to think you were broken. You know?” 

Louis thought about Lottie on the platform, her sparking eager thoughts running through the crowd even though he hadn’t ever met her wolf. She could telepath in human form. _ Just like him. _

“No one knew it was more than you, and no one knew it was more than me,” Louis said, “Us.” 

Lottie nodded back. He looked over at her again, their faces made solemn by the stark dim light. 

“I dreamed about our family, that they were all like us too,” Louis said. 

“Really?” Lottie asked. Louis nodded. The river hadn't been a river at all. It had been _ pack. _Telepathy, human and wolf, deeper and more powerful even than the telepathic plane the other packs had seemed to know. Layers and layers of mystery and every time that Louis felt sure he'd unraveled himself there was something more. 

“I don’t know much, I just know,” Louis made an aborted hand motion and stopped, frustrated, “Feelings, you know, that’s the only way it ever comes back to me,” of course it would be stupid _ feelings. _

“Do you want to remember?” Lottie asked. _ Because it’s ok, to just stop. _Louis could already tell she was going to be this, maybe for the rest of his life, a person who would ask the questions other people were afraid to ask, and he felt grateful all the way to the wolf still wandering in his heart.

“I think I’m ready to try to remember,” he said. “But that’s not all I was dreaming about.” Louis stopped for a moment, and Lottie gave the moment to him, certain that every hesitating word he had to share was important. It was a new way to have a conversation, or an old way, and Louis felt the brush of his own telepathy reaching out, like a curtain pulling open in front of a window.

He’d been dreaming of the past, and he’d been dreaming of the _ present. _He didn’t know what it meant, but he knew the shape of another mind out there; there was no mistaking that, not after Harry. 

“It could be that we were all like this, our pack,” Louis said. “So wouldn’t it make sense, maybe, if it had a purpose?”

Lottie wrinkled her nose, wolfish for an instant. “To use the plane, it’s something all packs do--” 

Louis hesitated, and then said it. “To, like, more than that. But me, I’ve never been pack. What happened with me and Harry? Still happened even though I wasn’t. So I was thinking, what if ours works differently? To pull into things on the telepathic plane, not always pack. To do it in human form too. It’s like, what they seemed to say in the inn was that it was just for running with the pack, and like, the wolves can do it in the woods together, but never when you’re human. But you and I, it feels like more. What happened with Harry felt like more. It felt like it was meant for something. What if I came all the way out here, because I could hear you?” 

Louis let his head sink deeper into the pillow, turned on his side and in toward his strange, new, old, family. Lottie settled her thumb and first finger on top of his curled hand and it felt familiar. 

_ What if, _ he could hear her wonder it over in her mind. “It wasn’t something under your control, with Harry,” she ventured carefully, and Louis snorted. What _ had _ been under his control with Harry, _ not my stupid feelings, _ he thought before he could stop it, but he didn’t even mind because she flashed back, flat and pragmatic and funny, _ want me to kill him? _

“Not yet,” Louis said, flippantly. “But what if all this stuff that we can do, it has another purpose?” 

_ The running, in the dream, his wolf reminded him, was not for fear. It was for finding. _

“Can you imagine it," Lottie said, excitement even through her whisper. "Like a whole pack of supertelepaths." Louis grinned at her. Put like that, everything about their strange, different minds felt marvelous. Put like that, they didn’t sound broken at all. 

“It’s a cool idea,” she said. 

“I think it’s more than an idea. I think I know,” Louis said.

Lottie frowned at him. “How do you know?” 

“Because I hear someone else,” Louis said. "And I think they need help."


	2. Chapter 2

**H.**

Harry regarded the ceramic bowl like the enemy it was. He braced his arms into the thick wooden top of the table as he felt his socked feet try to slip away on the kitchen floor, and barely avoided crashing down in front of his nemesis. 

“Is this some new technique I haven’t heard of? Like, intimidation baking?” Niall asked from the windowseat. 

Harry narrowed his eyes at the bowl. The bowl did nothing but look off-white and pleased with itself.

“It’s going to work this time,” Harry said.

“Of course it will,” Niall said soothingly. 

“Don’t mock me,” Harry said. 

Niall tapped his pencil as a retort. He was working on a crossword puzzle out of a book that one of the inn guests had left behind. Harry had no idea what kind of sick person would bring a _ World’s Hardest Crosswords _ compendium on a _ holiday _ but Niall was already one third of the way through and would occasionally interrupt otherwise normal conversation with questions like _ ‘What would you call a sheep in the weir?’ _

It had been a stupid couple of months. They all coped in their various ways. The inn guests seemed to feel the distant unhappiness despite Liam’s curated nature walks and Gemma’s resolute lobby checkins and the rest of the pack rallying around. Harry had stopped making cookies though, and guests came and went in a faster way than was usual during skiing and winter retreat seasons. The inn felt cavernous right now, empty and glowering in the slush of late winter. 

“Would I ever mock you. Don't answer that. Hey what’s a shade of lipstick for five letters?” Niall asked.

“Mauve,” Harry said.

“You’re a savant,” Niall said. “That’s like a genius who doesn’t do anything useful.” 

Harry snapped his teeth loud enough for Niall to hear, but without looking away from the bowl. 

“Eat a squirrel,” Niall said distractedly.

“I thought it was _ be nice to Harry week _,” Harry said.

“It’s been '_ be nice to Harry week' _ for six weeks and that shit has an expiration date. What’s a six letter word for _ lumberjack _ that starts with a _ B?” _

“Tree butcher,” Harry said. Niall made a disappointed _ you’re not taking crossword seriously _ noise through his nose. It sounded like a small _ squee _of air, like an aborted sneeze.

“Bark...ey,” Harry said.

“I come to you in my hour of need,” Niall started.

“Bunyan,” Harry said.

“_ Savant,” _Niall marveled, scribbling.

Harry shook his head. The bowl was starting to look a little watery with the intensity of his staring. He blinked but maintained eye contact. He shifted to get a little more friction under his elbows. 

“Rise, you mother_ fucker,” _Harry ground out through closed teeth.

Liam entered the kitchen just in time to hear it, and he looked deeply concerned. Harry ignored this, as Harry was developing very strong ignoring muscles for everything these days. He could ignore his own twice a day headaches, he could ignore the hole in the pit of his stomach every time he passed by the door to the room that had been Louis’, he could ignore whatever he wanted.

“Still on with the bread, then?” Liam said to Niall. 

“You know what they say about repeating the same behaviors and expecting a different outcome,” Niall said. 

Harry sighed. It disappeared into the yeast-scented air. Everything about the yeast had appeared satisfactory and yet he could also feel its hostility. He’d measured the water temperature with a brand-new kitchen thermometer that he’d ordered off of a fancy home goods store and that had taken a full two weeks to arrive, shipped up from the city on the train. He’d warmed the kitchen and trapped humidity by jamming the back door up with a towel and accidentally-not-really-on-purpose-just-not-caring trapping Zayn outside to take the long way in through the second mudroom. It had been spitting rain earlier in the morning, and the kitchen windows were humid, sweating from the inside.

“It’s going to work this time,” Harry repeated. 

“You haven’t gotten bread to rise for a month,” Liam pointed out, getting an apple from the counter and polishing it on his blue plaid shirt front.

“I know,” Harry snapped.

“I’m just saying, that’s quite a bit of flour lost,” Liam continued, oblivious, plopping himself down on the window seat to look unhelpfully over Niall’s shoulder at the crossword, and taking an enormous bite of apple. 

“I _ know,” _Harry said.

“Actually it's more like two months of this recipe not working,” Liam said with his mouthful, Harry was going to _ murder him, _ he was going to put Liam’s bones in the bowl, maybe _ then it would work-- _

“Ever since, you know, since Louis--” 

Several things happened at once. Liam stopped himself so suddenly he dropped his apple, Niall punctured the crossword page with his pencil hissing _ “Don’t say it,” _ Harry started snarling so deep in his throat and so viciously that it had to have come _ straight _from the wolf--

\--and Zayn flung himself through the side door, so fast and so hard that he skidded over the tiles, scattered snow, and knocked the entire bowl of dough off the kitchen island and onto the floor.

“That one was going to work,” Harry wailed at the end of the snarl. 

“Was it? Was it really, H?” Zayn said, brushing off his coat. Some errant ice landed on the floor; it kept threatening to warm, but then it kept snowing, this felt somehow in attunement with Harry’s despair. Harry collapsed onto the kitchen island, his face in the palms of his hands.

“Harry,” Liam said, in a tone that managed to encompass comfort to Harry, a chastisement at Zayn, and a general woebegone summary of the pack’s disarray. 

Niall sighed. Harry groaned. Zayn said nothing but the nothingness still sounded a little ashamed of itself. They all hated it, every last one of them. Board game nights had been quiet and evening romps had been non-existent. Harry spent more form in wolf than he wanted to admit these days, where things were sharper but also simpler.

Harry groaned again into his palms, unwilling or unable to be mature about it. Niall got off the windowseat and rolled the dough into the bowl. 

“What’s the prognosis,” Harry said, muffled.

“Erm,” Niall said. The dough was deflating into itself at a rapid pace, more like quicksand than proto-bread. Zayn was still dripping slush onto it. "Everything is going to be ok," Niall said. 

“People have been saying that a lot to me lately,” Harry said, into his hands, “And I am frankly done with it.” 

Liam made a sad noise and scooted forward in the kitchen to wrap an arm around Harry. Harry sniffed, melodramatically, but leaned into Liam. 

“Everything would have been ok,” Zayn said, “If you had just let me in.”

“Couldn’t,” Harry said into his hands. This too sounded deflated. “Eight letter word for optimal conditions of bread rising.” 

“Humidity!” Niall yelped from the floor.

“This--” Zayn swept a hand around at the kitchen, the pack, and paused to emphasize that he was particularly talking about Harry-- “Is a _ disaster,” _And then he paused to stomp more slush off his boots which slid across the tiles and into Harry’s socked feet. Harry finally picked his face up just to glare, which was clearly what Zayn wanted because he twinkled a terribly handsome smirk in Harry’s direction. They all coped in their various ways, and Zayn’s way was to reduce his social strategies to pecular Zayn-flavored thornbush bouquets of love, showing that he cared with the depth of his complaining. Harry could glare and feel comforted at the same time. 

“How many letters has Harry sent through interpack mail today?” Zayn asked.

“He’s been restrained, he hasn’t sent any,” Niall piped in. 

“One,” Harry said. And when they all whipped around to make faces at him, he shrugged. There had been a nuance of apology that had occurred to him at five fifteen in the morning while everyone else had been asleep. Harry had come down to the kitchen to write it out with a new pen, a very smooth ballpoint that Gemma had picked up at the bookstore on her last town run. Harry had a developed articulation around pens now. _ L, a new thing that bothered me last night was thinking that you’ll think I was always listening to your mind and I want you to know that I--I wasn’t, I wasn’t at all, it was mostly feelings, and it wasn’t really something that I understood. Not an excuse. Like I said before, none of it is an excuse. I just wanted you to know that I was listening to what you said, not just what you thought. And it wasn’t always what you thought, as much as it was just something what you felt, and again, well, I don’t know if that makes it better or worse but I just thought it would be better to describe it accurately, you know. _

He had walked through a biting spring wind to post it in their red letterbox at the end of the winding drive, and his footprints were still out there, now mingled with Zayn’s, melting away under the stronger sun. 

“Luckily you are _ our _ disaster,” Zayn said. He pulled an envelope from the inside of his jacket and held it, proprietarily in two hands on the edges. It was miraculously un-slushed, and it had a fine pen-inked scrawl in small letters, Harry bet it was a scratchy normal table pen, not a very good pen at all, the kind of cheap blue plastic-cased pen that people kept lying around next to phones in hallways from decades ago. But none of that mattered because the envelope read, _ To the pack at the inn. _

“Brought you a letter back this time,” Zayn said. 

***

**L. **

It seemed improbable to have a routine when your life fell under the category “a situation you’d never been capable of imagining.” And the magic was the least of it compared to the idea that Louis could be somebody who had _ family, _and that the inn wasn’t nearly the only wolf pack in the world, and the stretching horizon of possibility that that created in this new imagination, a world full of wolves and packs and communities in small rural towns all linked by railroads and forests and a predilection for houses on the borders of society. 

And yet he had settled, after a probationary period of about three days when the only conversation possible was _ how _ and _ why _ and _ I can’t believe it, _into something that Louis realized was a routine.

He still woke up earlier than everyone else, but Lottie was the second up, clearly not by choice, but like she was determined to be there when he was. He liked this quality about her: determined, seeking no input, a bright spark rubbing her eyes all morning and drinking cups of coffee at an alarming rate. They got quiet cereal together (cereal! Cereal was amazing, Louis loved it. The east pack house kept buckets of cereal in sealed up tupperwares. Lottie watched Louis try three different sugar cereals in a creative blend and every morning thereafter there were new varieties to try). Nobody cooked like Harry and the rest of the inn pack cooked--Louis missed that, but he wasn’t going to say it. Louis didn’t really have a job like he’d taken over cleaning in the early mornings at the inn. He also missed the cleaning, but he didn’t know how to tell anybody this. It was like a weird vacation, coupled with telepathy lessons and wolf lessons, and these were draining enough things that Louis could come back to the (wrong-smelling) house after a day out in the town with Lottie, walking around, straining between words and telepathy, and feeling like he was learning to furnish a part of his body left vacant for some years.

The east pack was nice--nicer than Zayn’s snapping remarks, as nice as anything, and Louis was a good judge of this, well trained in making quick, sweeping judgments about the overall safety of any social situation he found himself in. Most of the wolves were older than Lottie and Louis, and out doing whatever it was that the eastern pack did in the wolf ecosystem (“Ah, you know, shipping,” Ed said, incredibly vague and answering nothing, and waving toward the train station, “Logistics”). So it was only Ed and an older wolf couple--Candace and Anna--who lived in the house full-time with Lottie. Their house was on a quiet side street, and comfortingly mundane, although still very wolfish around all the edges; after all Louis had _ met _ Anna as a wolf, since she preferred to be wolf over human most days of the week (“Touch of dysmorphia comes up in the winter for her, we’re all used to it,” Candace had explained, waving a hand over a coffee pot at her wife, “It's very handy what the animal can solve”). Anna’s wolf was splendid, a wolf with uniquely monochrome silver fur and tall legs who moved carefully with aging grace, and she spent a lot of the time she wasn’t outdoors curled up underneath the massive living room sitting chair while Candace read knitting blogs and posted violent opinions online about yarn types. 

_ Don’t ask, _Lottie telegraphed across the room as soon as Louis wondered what it was that made one feel strongly about yarn, and Louis didn’t. 

Even after he sent the letter back to the inn there was something about the quiet of the eastern pack that bled into the landscape of Louis’ mind. They were waiting, and he was learning, and that was an ok place to be. It was new and interesting to be able to do something hard and then not panic afterward, but Louis found himself still able to focus on the small things. He had learned about cereal and a new town that had more than one grocery store, he had learned that the eastern pack organized trains and that Steve was several packs over on his wandering doctor visits, a thought that filled Louis with a sly, side happiness. Steve had sent word back along the trains to Louis, like a mental handshake and a reminder that there were strands of care woven all over his life now, inn or no inn. 

He had learned that Lottie had a fine tuned control over her telepathy when they were in human form, and that she always had: the whole pack knew that she could do it, but nobody really knew what it was _ for. _

_ It’s getting stronger, this whole telepathy thing, isn’t it, _Lottie had thought matter-of-factly, a week after Louis had told her about the message, the vision, the--he didn’t know what. A week after the letter. He still didn’t know how to handle the thought that he had opened a doorway back to the inn and the pack that he didn’t really want to--couldn’t really think about. But there was that person out there with the brain like theirs, and Louis knew it like a decision that he’d already made, that he had to find them. 

_ I’ve always had flickers from people and I’ve been able to direct it when I really cared but lately it’s just--it’s like a radio channel cutting in, louder than it used to be. _

_ I’m sorry, _Louis said. It had felt like he was bleeding over the borderlands between them in some unacceptable way. Like surely it was his fault. Lottie frowned and scooted closer and flicked him on the shoulder.

_ I think it’s good. Don’t you want to know what we’re capable of? _

Louis didn’t answer. Their telepathy was not the river of his dreams, but it was...something extraordinary, like catching the flow of water from a faucet and letting it run over his hands. He could tell more things about it: he could tell the wolf to mute it, or to widen it, he had realized with proximity to Lottie and comparing their experiences that she had a fine mental ear for different people but that he had a scanning sort of sense, like casting a net toward the horizon in every direction. He was grateful in the extreme for the fact that he wasn’t broadcasting his thoughts indiscriminately to all people--only Harry had had that privilege, apparently.

_ Stop worrying, _ Lottie thought automatically. Louis snorted into the window. _ It’s in my nature. _They sat there often in the afternoon when the still short afternoons started darkening and the street lights started turning on, trading perceptions about the nearby street that was hidden from the house by a row of gardens.

_ There’s Ed going for groceries, _Lottie thought, and she flashed the image she was getting into Louis’ head, frowning in concentration. Ed in a thick brown coat, with an easy attitude. Louis watched her, a tightly curled-up frame that kept going in and out of reminding him of himself. It was so, so strange to try to get to know someone who reminded you of yourself. They had similar looking knees. 

_ Kids, _ Louis sent the thought to Lottie, stretched out and vaguely there but still _ real _ , a family making their way in from the train station. It was like stretching a muscle he’d only just realized he had. _ Tired kids, angry because they’re tired kids. Somebody’s gonna have a tantrum. Mom, he’s touching me, kind of tantrum. _

_ You never got that way, _ Lottie thought suddenly, _ even when you were really fed up. You were always a very gentle big brother. You know, not one of the mean ones, pulling hair. Hugs all the time. Cuddly. Like you would be now, if you weren’t so careful. _

Louis turned to stare at her and she stared back, shrugging. She didn’t need to surface the thought for him to know that this had been an instinct more than a memory, or maybe something that intertwined both. 

Louis thought about it. In their invisible past life together, Lottie would’ve been a toddler, and Louis--Louis’ memories disappeared into smoke sometime then, sometime back when he remember kitchen counters still feeling too high. Had there been kitchen counters? Had they had a town like this one, with its own railway station? He thought he would’ve been careful with a toddler, definitely. Toddlers had small bones, small hands, frighteningly small, eyes that were too big, toddlers were scary. Louis didn’t know whether he’d ever touched a baby, but he must have. They were supposed to smell nice, but he couldn’t remember this. He liked the way that some babies looked angry and ancient, frowning at the world with no inhibition at all. 

_ Pretty sure you cried a lot, _ Louis thought. And then, a riskier move-- _ pretty sure you were LOUD. _

Lottie lifted her shoulders in another shrug, grinning, grown up in that disconcerting teen girl way, a way that Louis respected and didn’t understand and generally stood back from. She had a whole family here, which he was grateful for, who seemed to understand her. She was wearing a pink necklace that look gelatin somehow, with sparkles in it. Louis never would’ve touched such a thing. _ I’m sure the crying was justified. _

He reached out a hand and she reached back, fingertips to fingertips, something that was becoming a habit for them. He turned back to the street to practice.

_ We should try the sensing in wolf, it’ll be easier to know how to works, if we could be together there, _ Lottie thought, patiently, a thought she’d sent him consistently over the past few weeks. _ Maybe we could amplify your range. Maybe at night, with the moon-- _

Behind it was another thought--that maybe as wolves they could remember _ more, _ not just about Louis’ strange dreams of the present, but the interwoven dreams about the past _ . _ He could feel her probing. Lottie had no trouble turning into her wolf form, had grown up in a pack, had always felt a little bit different but hadn’t in any way been like _ him, _running and scared and shrunk down to the barest shadow of whoever he was. Louis hadn’t been a wolf with any of them yet, too scared, too cowardly, just not yet able to imagine running through the woods even though he knew that he could change now. But something inside of him scratched, restless, wanting to move.

_ I know, _he sent back, a flash of limb and teeth somewhere in the back of his mind. 

Lottie looked at him, unblinking and unafraid. 

_ Do you want to know what we’re capable of? _

If anyone had asked him this in his previous life, the city life full of silence and dodging around corners and barely hanging on, Louis thought that he would have wanted more than anything to _know _more about himself. But it turned out that the knowing itself was immense, a complicated weight that hung over him, sometimes, and that _knowing_ there was yet more mystery and rectifying that gap were two different things. 

“Maybe it’ll just happen when it happens, us remembering what it’s all for,” Louis said, and Lottie pushed her fingertips in against his a fraction of an inch, an affirmative. She didn’t push, and Louis was grateful again. He wondered whether he was disappointing her, and he breathed out around that thought, let it settle in the weight of everything else. There were just so many different pieces to figure out, and he was only human. Sort of. 

Lottie turned back to the street and wrinkled her nose, like she could smell through the window. 

“There’s Ed, interesting that the pack lead is always easier to find when you look for specific minds, right?” 

“It’s like that under the full moon when you run with a pack, isn’t it?” Louis asked. Lottie nodded.

“I guess. Pack hierarchy shit,” she said dismissively. Lottie was irreverent and silly about wolf things and especially pack belonging in a way that secretly thrilled Louis, and he suspected she was emphasizing it even more for him. He leaned against the window and felt the sun through it. The days were getting warmer. 

“Well, and _ your _pack lead,” Lottie said. Louis caught his breath. He turned toward the gardens and focused. He could feel the shape of Gemma in Lottie’s mind, an upward tilt of her chin, something challenging in it toward the big, spring-cold world. He suddenly missed her, missed the easy way that she’d taken him shopping, missed her out of place red car and her shining, obvious need to do the right thing. 

“Not mine,” Louis said, just half a minute too late, and Lottie just watched him, something like _ I want to talk about it more _in her mind, but she didn’t lean into the thought and it never clarified into anything solid. This was amazing, this deepening clarity over the telepathy and the way that it could transmit feelings without being a terror. 

Gemma was here to talk to Ed, and that meant they all would be soon. He felt his toes curl in against the tile floor. 

_ Are you sure you feel ready to see them again? _Lottie thought. 

Louis leaned into the window and felt the world pressing in against his mind. There was a tree outside that had buds on it, red and brown and covered in fast-growing leaves that looked resilient under the icy layers that come down on them every morning. Last night it had happened again. He’d had those strange visions in his dreams. There had been a warehouse and twisted wires and the sharp, increasing claustrophobia of a city rising around him. There had been a lot of things that hadn’t felt like Louis at all, had felt like another, unfamiliar wolf, and then there had been things that felt so familiar that Louis had woken up, wondering whether the inn and the house and his brand new sister were the dream. The bitter certainty of being alone, rising up the back of his throat, filling his guts from the inside, getting too heavy to bear. _ Monster. _

_ No, I don’t feel ready, _he thought back to Lottie. It was good and bad mixed together to have this handle on his strange mind, to be able to send the thought and the feeling and the wholeness of it along the telepathic plane, where there was no room for a lie. It was the wolf mind, and the human mind, and you couldn’t have the telepathy without both of them. The difficulty with wanting to get to know someone, with wanting to let them be your family, is that you also had to let them get to know you. 

_ I never feel ready for anything. But something is happening, somebody’s out there. Doesn’t matter if I’m ready. _

“I would expect nothing less,” Lottie said, and Louis wondered how she knew enough about him to say something like that.

***

Ed came back and said that they would convene a joint session with the packs tomorrow. He looked worriedly at Louis when he said it, but Louis nodded over a supplemental comfort bowl of cereal, and felt it down through his socks on the floor. It was right, ready or not. 

That night Louis decided to take the wolf out. 

The particular east pack house that Louis was staying in sat on a garden path that led to the upper part of town, a region Lottie had told Louis was optimistically reserved for large family houses and the far away grocery store that nobody wanted to go to. The path turned into a sidewalk and then back into a path, and there were trees all around, but they were terribly domestic. They had never quite satisfied on a daily walk. Louis found himself wrinkling his nose as he passed, and then he smoothed his face, feeling distracted and vaguely worried that the trees might feel insulted.

They couldn’t help being born in a town, he thought, any more than he could help wanting so badly to get out of it. 

He thought longingly of the woods. It almost seemed like the woods were thinking back. Somewhere three train stations down a long track, the nature preserve was there and so was the inn. Louis knew that the eastern pack’s woods did at some point wander into the territory of the nature preserve, and he also knew that Lottie had promised to go with him any time he wanted a transformation, but he also knew that he wanted to be alone. Sometimes he wondered if he’d been alone so long that it had fundamentally warped his brain, that loneliness fell over him like a blanket, comforting despite never feeling anything like warmth. 

Louis flexed his hands in his pockets. He was wearing a new denim jacket that he never would've touched except that Lottie had opinions about what was in, and had come back with it during the first days he was in the house and presented it with a touch of nervousness in her mind, carefully concealed, but he could tell. He wore it nearly every day. 

It was weird, to feel the sense of the pack here pricking on the edge of his awareness. It was weird to wonder whether he had any kind of claim over them. He thought suddenly about the gorgeous shape of Harry's shoulders, bending over the table, the gentle way that he put cookie trays out in the hallway. He only really let himself think about Harry when he was alone. It was ludicrous that this made him want to shiver all over, like thinking about how Harry must be doing small, every day things was the breaking point, the ache in his heart. 

Louis stopped when the trees felt _ right: _solid, towering up, blocking out every street light. He must have been going for thirty or forty minutes and he had been walking fast, but he noticed with a jump in his heart that he was warm. Warm like a wolf, these days. He chucked the jacket under a bush that he made a note to remember, although he was certain that his wolf’s nose would help. He toed off his shoes, shrugged, and left the socks there too. The snow was slushy, a spring consistency that should’ve burned. It didn’t. He walked out, feeling the stars overhead. 

He closed his eyes, and kept walking. He was _ done _with being afraid of the wolf. The forest was deep in peacefulness, a lush, growing sense of spring coming in despite the cold. He could smell it. He could feel rabbits and owls and all sorts of small creatures. He wanted to be paws and fur and quiet, quiet wandering. 

At a certain point he must have gone from human to wolf, but the point was indeterminate, in the way that all points were actually lines when looked at closely enough, a paradox without an end. He was fluid and that was what mattered--the rush of wind in his ears stopped seeming cold, the bite of pine needles and gravel became sharp with information, and he left clothes and cares somewhere between a winter-dried bush and an east pack cache tucked into a tree. _ Run. _The stars shone overhead, felt like they were looking down on him. Louis could’ve cried if that had been a thing that wolves did. After so many wrenching nights under an unforgiving moon it was now easy, so easy, to change. It didn’t hurt at all.

He ran, slow and free and easy, enjoying the feeling of his new limbs. His mind went broad rather than deep, the mindful present of the animal brain coming forward. How had this ever seemed monstrous? It was beautiful, just to be present. It was full of smells and sounds and reactions, a dance of paying attention. Cognition blurred into the wolf mind, a telepathic plane full of real life counterparts, the churning peaceful stir of the forest. He knew ecosystems and communities, like the towns on the railroad, he smelled animal comings and goings in their busy channels around water, around food. Everything was so simple here. He lost track of time. What was time? Just a measurement for heartbeat. He went deep into the woods, so deep.

Too deep. 

Louis felt the presence between one footfall and the next. Maybe that was the part of his brain that was still human, pretending it _ hadn’t. _Maybe the wolf had known already, and pulled him toward it like the wanting thing it was.

Harry came out of the woods. Harry in wolf form, beautiful, _ infuriating, _ as much a part of the wintery woods as the ice, but like the coming spring too, something hot and ferocious underneath the surface that was trying so hard to stay put until it was time. Harry, afraid, bold, unsure, nearly certain that he was making a mistake in a way that blistered into the telepathic plane and yet moving forward anyway because, what if he _ wasn’t. _

_ For FUCK’S sake, _Louis thought, and was surprised and pleased with himself. His heart pounded, human and wolf together. 

_ I can leave, _ Harry thought immediately, the human in him sounding twisted, and for the first time in a long time between them the thoughts went both directions so Louis thought back immediately, rather sarcastically, _ isn’t that a long way home? _

Wolves didn’t love to think in words but Louis could feel the scramble of Harry’s mind, shifting between apology and discarded apology and emotion. He shifted in the brush, whipping his tail. Harry slunk forward. It felt like Harry. It didn’t feel like they’d had two months and no contact but Harry’s letters: Louis felt all of Harry’s heart coming at him, stumbling, big, brave, _ familiar. _Louis nearly choked on how much he missed it. He took every single bit of his newfound telepathic magic and made sure that feeling wouldn’t leak out to Harry, not even a trace.

_ What are you doing here? _

_ I don’t know, _ Harry thought, distressed, his wolf leaning down toward the ground and objectively looking ridiculous. _ I couldn’t sleep and I knew Gemma had come and I knew we were going to--it was like the woods were calling, and I’m so glad to see you, you know, but I didn’t mean to-- _ he was holding himself back, Louis could feel it, from stepping into the morass that was their last conversation-- _ I didn’t come out because I knew you were here, the wolf just-- _

_ Fine. _Louis whipped his head sharply to the side, and Harry whined in the back of his throat. Dismissed and reactive, what a shift in their strange interaction, what a difference from the first time they’d met. Louis didn’t want to remember that and he stuffed it away. Harry had always made him feel so important, and that hadn’t changed either. 

He thought about tomorrow, pointedly--_ we’ll have work to do. _

_ Yes, _ Harry thought, _ of course, I read it--we’ll be there, and I’ll--I’m going to help-- I just want to-- _

_ Ok. Fine. _ Louis dissociated from it, looking away into the dark, a wolfishly pointed _ well I’m running, whatever you’re doing. _ This too surprised him, and it was brilliant, a thick, satisfying thing to just say _ fuck _ the complexity and the fine-grained human steps of shattered relationship. Louis was a wolf, and wolves _ ran. _ Harry could be there or not. See if Louis cared. See if Louis _ stopped. _

He ran. He didn’t look to see whether Harry followed. He hoped to the moon that Harry couldn't feel the shivering want that thudded against his ribcage.

Harry fell into pace beside him, a little further back, and Louis wove his way around trees, under brush, over hills. Their energy burned in the night. Everything was gorgeous. The moon was finally rising over the hill--he must have been running longer than it had felt like, _ that’s always what it’s like, _ that was Harry’s memory, quick and then immediately apologetic, like he was apologizing for _ thinking _ and yet also there he still was, alongside Louis like he couldn’t _ stop _.

Louis snarled against the cold air. It wasn’t full-throated, but it was enough. 

_ I just wanted to talk, _ Harry said, in their half-joined telepathy. A brush caught against Louis’ paw and he shook it out, sensations of pine so very much like the sensation of annoyance. _ I just wanted to see--if you are ok. _

But the feeling wasn’t just annoyance. It was sadness and anger and stupid, stupid feelings, all of them roiling up and none of them what the wolf could handle. Louis shook his head and felt his ears move, dismissing it all away. For now, it was being here. _ I know. But I’ve decided that I very much hate talking. _

That caught Harry underneath the chin like a quickly thrown snowball and suddenly he was _ laughing, _ strange little wolf yips of absurdity. And _ this, _Louis found far more possible to tolerate.

_ I know, _Harry thought. 

Oh, the wolf ached. There was nothing else to do about it, so Louis ran fast, and hard, and made Harry work to keep up. 

Eventually they came out into one of those illusive meadows in the middle of a forest, a scene that Louis would’ve thought could only properly belong in a movie before he had discovered all of this. Something about the sheltering hill made it warmer here, and the drifts of snow were caught only in the most shadowed inclines. Everywhere else, it had melted, revealing ugly brown spring dirt damp with promise. Through a wolf’s eyes, Louis could see how lovely it was even without any flowers. It was a change, and change was good.

He went out into the meadow. They were far away from their respective homes, not that Louis knew where his home was. He could hear Harry behind him, and the sky was getting lighter instead of darker. They must have been out for hours. If Louis had been closer to his human self, he would be worrying. He was _ tired _of worrying. He was, simply, tired. So he lay down. 

Harry crept forward in the grass, long-limbed and ridiculous. _ I am. Really sorry, _he thought. The thought wasn’t even pushed at Louis. It was like Harry was afraid to even think too hard, so aware of the boundaries between them that he was barely letting himself use telepathy at all. 

_ I am really, really done, with having a life that people are sorry about, _Louis thought. He wasn’t looking at Harry, couldn’t, wanted to, didn’t. Everything was a pull between instinct and things that he was probably going to remember when he was a human, and things got much more complicated, but there was also a fresh, clean air, and soft dirt, and he loved the feeling of it all. Maybe this was the real part. 

_ There is nothing about your life, _ Harry thought, clearly and carefully, like every word was a limited resource, _ to be anything but proud of. _

Carefully, Louis moved his head. Harry blinked at him, huge dark wolf eyes that carried stars. Wolves were physical together as a matter of course, always moving even when they were laying down, long graceful limbs curling into tight packages, snuffling faces making investigations. Cuddly was what Lottie had said, like a never-traveled path that Louis could've gone down. Louis hadn’t quite yet learnt the poetry of it. He didn't know, but his wolf could feel it. It was a kind of solution too real and immediate for all of the silly humans with their silly words, and every part of him wanted it, to be close and warm and to belong, even though none of the belonging had been solved at all. Louis wondered whether he could live this way, like snatching small breaths of air from underwater, and he decided that he didn't care. Harry was still, so still that Louis almost wondered if he was even breathing. 

Louis shuffled forward, forelimbs pressing into the damp ground where the snow had already melted. Spring was going to come eventually. Change was always going to come. The wolf ached less, with Harry here. Louis missed the inn and the kitchen and the sound of all of them talking. Maybe it was stupid. Maybe he didn't care. 

The space between not touching and touching was a point, or a line, or a fluid transition, he didn’t know which, but he’d made it across the infinite gap between them and he was there. Harry’s head was warm and still and oh, so very, very careful. Louis moved into his shoulder, shoved carefully against his side, as carefully as a wolf could, curled-in paws and slow breaths, neither of them looking at each other. Louis didn’t know what any of it meant or what he _ wanted _but he knew that the wolf was quiet, and the trees finally smelled right. They fell asleep.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my dear friends. What a moment in the world right now. I...I am with you all in the chaos and the fear and the stress that we are living through right now with covid19 in our various homes. I thought long and hard about whether I wanted or could keep writing fic right now and I just wanted to say that I thought it would be good to lean into comforting, gentle, one foot in front of the other kind of things right now, and I hoped that maybe some of you out there would feel the same. This chapter was a struggle to finish with everything else going on and I do not feel it is my strongest and writing is hard and pales in comparison to what else is going on, but I guess my hope is that it can still be some kind of distraction. Sending you all the love in the world.

**H.**

They were all going to the eastern pack town in a caravan, which Harry fully expected to result in someone losing a limb. Antsy wolves stuffed into a couple of pack cars filled with an inordinate amount of luggage ‘just in case’ spelled _ someone _ accidentally falling out of a window, and besides, all the wolves could feel the _ springtime. _Changing seasons always brought chaos.

But it was a good chaos. It felt like a field trip combined with a reunion, and like nerves, but happy nerves. It was something like all of them thinking _ finally, my god, _ the thrumming missingness of Louis-not-being-there turning to something more excited and less sad _ . _Harry breathed it in on the air, like green grass underneath the snow, like the first firm green stalks of the bulbs that you forgot you planted months ago, rising up. 

Not that it was just going to be fixed like magic. Not that the entire pack did not understand the heartbreaking necessity of boundaries. They weren't walking back into what it had used to be. Losing Louis had felt like nothing so much as coming face to face with that. None of them besides Zayn had had any significant experience with this feeling of loss and missing and _ nothing you can do about it _ , the pack drumbeat under their ribs telling them to go _ find _him. It had provoked some consideration of how much they had all--nearly all--taken for granted. Pack had been everything for Harry forever, but the last two months had made him question that. It was uncomfortable, restless, necessary. 

Still, still. Things were growing, just like they did every year. Harry had to believe that meant something, like it always did. 

Harry watched Liam and Niall argue doggedly and pointlessly over the benefits of bringing a waterproof jacket over a cozier fleece, leaning in the doorway because he had been ready hours earlier. Harry had spent the day outside, even after a night spent sleeping in wolf, desperate to feel the clutch and realness of nature around him. _ Ok, _ Harry had thought to himself, throwing a sloshy ineffective snowball into a melting drift. _ Ok, ok, ok. _ Anticipation was in the air, smelling like lightning. Based on Louis’ letter there were things afoot that none of them had seen before, but Harry had _ always _felt like that about Louis. Part of him wasn’t surprised at all. 

He just wanted, more than anything, the chance to do it better. This time. 

Harry could feel Gemma’s unspoken shiftiness at the pack on the move. Nobody liked leaving the territory, not even to visit well-liked neighbors. But it had been clear as soon as they’d read the letter that everything was going to happen around Louis and Lottie, and they only wanted to help. They were all willing to go, even if the territory sang underneath their feet. Pack alliances were for this, exactly--for the moment your lost, missing, wanted, precious not-at-all-boyfriend sends a letter asking for help. 

And of course they would also meet _ Lottie. _ By the moon. Harry kicked many snowballs about his feelings on that point, not that he had the right to have any feelings, he didn’t know. Speculation about Louis’ family had been a feature of the last few months. Harry was filled up to an aching point with questions, and he was sure that the others felt the same. But pack alliances were also for things like being told in short, careful terms that Louis was safe and also _ that Louis had family, _and it very much wasn’t anybody’s business but his. Which, fair enough. 

Overwhelmingly, Harry was happy for Louis. More happy than words could say. He was a lot of things together, happy and sad and getting used to that in the middle of a life that had been mostly only the former; he was full of questions, but questions weren’t the sharp edge of panic at the idea that Louis had been flung back out there, into an empty world, a wolf alone. _ He isn’t a wolf alone anymore, _ Gemma had said, late at night while spending a great deal of time listening to Harry at his most dreary. Harry was going to owe Gemma forever, obviously, although they bounced back and forth in the great sibling exchange of mutual support, _ even-when-you-are-stupid. He did that on his own, _ Harry said, because it had been true. _ But you were still part of it, _Gemma had said. 

There had been a lot packed into Louis’ very tightly-written letter. It had read with quick, efficient lines that somehow nevertheless managed to sound like Louis, so much that Harry had read the letter five times over (well, ten times. Maybe fifteen. Who was counting. Not Harry). 

_ I would not have sent this if I didn’t think it was important. Ed and the rest of the pack have said, this is important. I felt like I should be the one to describe it, because I’m the one who can hear it, even though I don't know if I can fully describe it. It’s a wolf, out there somewhere, a wolf like me. It feels like we should go find them, and help them. Ed says, this is something for everybody. A pack decision. _

Harry could imagine Louis hesitating over that. _ Pack, _ something he didn’t know whether Louis believed in yet. He tried not to wonder whether the east pack had become Louis’ home, whether the presence of Louis’ sister was proof enough that the inn had never been right, that the inn and the territory and the messy, good-hearted, but so-full-of-mistakes pack that was Harry’s would never be a fit for Louis. Harry shook the thought away, so selfish, and yet, so impossible to stop thinking it. 

_ I’ve never heard someone so far away before, _ Louis had written. _ Someone like me. _

Harry could imagine Louis writing it out, frowning at the paper and making sure that everybody knew that he never would have tried to trouble anyone for a meeting if this hadn’t been something confirmed by a higher authority. Like they weren’t, every one of them, dying for the chance to see him, like they needed an emergency instead of just permission. Harry hoped someone was providing him with tea. 

“You think we’re fully prepared for this odyssey?” Zayn asked, a little sarcastic, showing up at Harry’s elbow and making him jump. 

“Sure,” Harry said, “Liam has snacks. I have potluck contributions and snacks. We have competing snacks.” 

“Well, that makes sense for how you two operate,” Zayn said. “I’m bringing nothing but my keen sense of adventure.” He was lying though, because he had a backpack hanging casually on his arm. Gemma had pushed Harry out of his own bedroom with an irritable _ I’ll throw yours together with mine _ and Harry had taken a sort-of-not-really nap in the living room, soothed by the comfortable bustle of his packmates. They were all bringing changes of clothes. Maybe this was preemptive, but hey. Harry’s pack was nothing if not action oriented. The wolves wanted to _ move. _

Nobody had seemed to notice Harry slink in early in the morning. Louis had been long gone by the time Harry woke up, a fact which he had expected, and nonetheless which had sunk in between his ribs like a knife, and stayed there. 

Zayn nudged him. “You’re quiet today, and it gives me the creeps,” he said. 

“You always give me the creeps,” Harry said, with great love. Zayn grinned at him, and ruffled his hair. 

“You smell like dirt,” Zayn said sagely, “Don’t think I haven’t noticed. So is he doing ok?” 

Harry sighed. A small twig had fallen out of his hair and he kicked it with his boot. When he had woken up early in the morning with the first sunbeams, still a wolf, he had felt cold on one side and warm on the other, as if Louis had melted into the ground a moment before. Zayn always knew things and it was a thing that Harry loved about him. 

“I think so,” he answered honestly, “But I also don’t feel like I know anything. At the very least, he misses us.” 

“Who wouldn’t,” Zayn said, an uncharacteristically warm thing. Harry smiled at him and ruffled his hair back. Zayn put it right quickly, with well-practiced fingers. Behind them in the hallway, Niall was stuffing shoes into a bag, all the shoes that Louis hadn’t taken. They were going out into the unknown to face an unknown threat, but by the moon, Louis was going to have his shoes. 

“Adventures are good,” Zayn said, looking out at the yard. Harry considered the ways in which Zayn had had to live that principle, in his life, and he nodded. He considered the nerves that his wolf felt through his connection to the pack, the way that all of them were hoping. He didn’t know what he did to deserve the pack that he had, but he hoped to keep deserving it. 

“It’s a lot of unknown, a loose wolf--” Harry stopped, and didn’t finish the sentence, but he could see the slightly sad smile in the corner of Zayn’s mouth that told him he understood. 

“Adventures are good, as long as we have brought enough food,” Zayn said, poking fun at the tupperwares stacked up on the counter and ready to go. 

“Oh, we have enough food, of that I’m certain, of that one thing at least,” Harry said, and he started organizing the food, his jacket, anything he could do as they all hustled to go, anything but organizing his thoughts. 

Harry did not mention the thudding question behind all of the other questions, which was, _ what if we do everything right, and he still doesn’t want to come back? _

*******

The pack, in a show of love that would have melted Harry into tearful appreciation if he wasn’t clamping down on his emotions with the dogged determination of a wolf in the deepest night of winter, carried all of Harry’s potluck in from the cars. The east pack town was still lit up with their winter lights. Tall street lamps lit the way from the guest parking lot, and cobbled stone pathways painted a postcard scene of quiet streets. Even Zayn, who typically scoffed that the east pack environs were too snotty for words, looked mildly impressed. 

“What even is this?” Harry heard Liam whisper to Zayn, rattling a tupperware. They were getting on for two people who had used to fight horribly about the whole existence of the east pack and Liam’s erstwhile girlfriend, whom Harry hadn’t heard mention of for several months. Come to think of it, they were getting on very well since Louis had left, like it brought out the best in both of them. 

“Eggplant something,” Zayn said very distastefully. 

“At least he’s trying,” Liam said mournfully. 

_ It’s lasagne, _ Harry thought, and then flinched, because maybe the thought was heavy, maybe it would transmit through the walls and the wooden beams of the house, maybe Louis could _ hear him already and _ it was just so goddamn _ fucked up, _having to be afraid of your own accidental telepathy--

“Hey,” Gemma said, with her hand on the back of Harry’s shoulderblade. “Breathe in, breathe out.” 

It was a thing they’d used to do when Harry was small and easily overwrought. He leaned his forehead onto the cool car. He breathed against Gemma’s palm. The wolf, so much more straightforward than the human, felt soothed. Gemma smelled like her mild, organic perfume and the green beans she’d been eating for a snack on the drive over. The east pack territory smelled of wolf, _ different _wolf, wrong but friendly, like Ed standing on the porch waving them all in. Harry stood by the car and leaned into Gemma and didn’t yet follow the wave.

“It’s all right,” Gemma said. “He wanted us here, remember? It’s all right. And not all of this is about you.” She said it gently, slightly laughing, but Harry knew she wasn’t laughing at him. 

“I know,” Harry said, because it _ had to be. _He remembered the conversations he’d already had with Steve, and the tentative messages relayed back from the east pack through Liam and Niall, gentle and nondirectional and definitely not personally for Harry but still, enough to come. 

_ He’ll be fine around you. _

_ The telepathy won’t be a problem. _

_ We think we might need you. _

Being needed wasn’t in any way the same thing as being _ wanted, _Harry thought, but it was something to start with. 

“You can do this,” Gemma said, pushing off with a little squeeze to his elbow and making her way toward the meeting. Harry nodded, still not moving. Nearly everyone else had already made it to the community hall. Harry was absolutely going to get there. Just as soon as he could stop thinking of Louis in the woods, his wolf shape coming through the trees, the soft, relentless way that Harry’s wolf wanted to find him, and a dark place in the forest, and curl up for a long sleep. 

Harry put his head back down on the car. 

Liam ran back through the snow, eggplant-less. “Harry. You coming? No bread to bake right now.” 

“I know,” Harry said, not moving. “Totally coming.” The car smelled terrible, the awful smell of gas that hurt his wolf nose. Trains were vastly preferable. The east pack territory spread out under his feet, shifty and unreliable. Everything smelled like _ cedar. _Gross. 

“Council’s big,” Liam reported, looking a little bit excited. “East pack is full out. Some people I’ve never met before. This is interesting, you know, Steve is on the way too, he’s still traveling, but this is pretty unprecedented. I wonder if Louis would let me study the--” 

“If Louis would let you _ what?” _said a girl’s voice. Harry picked his head up from the car.

It had to be her. She was recognizable immediately--not the same, but, similar. She was sharp, not in physicality but in _ presence, _sharp like an icicle, the wolf just under the surface, but Harry could feel the deep control that ran all the way through her like the solid beams of the inn. This was someone who knew what she was here for. 

“Nothing,” Liam said. “Just wanted to...ask some questions.” 

“I think Louis is the one who’s going to decide what he wants to share,” the girl said. Her arms were folded, and she was looking at Liam. Liam shuffled from one foot to the other. 

“Of course,” he said quickly. 

“Right,” the girl said. She couldn’t have been very old and she wasn’t very tall--Liam by contrast should have been muscled and intimidating, but if he’d been a wolf, the wolf would’ve been in the grass like a cub. 

The girl smiled. She looked at Harry. Harry got the sense that she knew exactly who he was, and he didn’t love the feeling of it. He shivered a little in the spring air. Still, he almost wanted to smile at her. She was amazing. 

“I’m Lottie,” she said. The way she said it leaned into the _ L, _slid off the end, and made what should’ve been a nickname sound as powerful as a title. 

“I’m Harry. It’s nice to meet you,” Harry said. 

“_ I,” _Lottie went on like he hadn’t spoken, but narrowing her eyes at Harry and smiling at the same time, a truly disconcerting combination, “--am Louis’ family.” 

She said it not even over the edge of a polite volume, and yet. The words hung in the crisp air around them. The wolf inside her grinned.

“Right,” Harry said quickly, “That’s. That’s amazing.” 

“Yeah,” she said, a little softer this time. He could hear the repressed marvel in it and he really wanted to smile then, but there was still a strung-out tension in the air, and he could smell east pack all around them, so he didn’t. 

Her telepathy was there, he realized. Or his _ wolf _realized. It had been there the whole time. This was a peculiar difference in the wolf powers and it was like Louis, and yet--her own. Harry couldn’t believe that this was an entire category of wolf he just...hadn’t known about. She was the sharp jolt of falling over a knoll into a new ecosystem, she was the twitching in your ears when you realized you weren’t alone, she was the not-bad but not-exactly-good way that Harry felt on the borders of the territory, like the ground was turning to ice and invisible ponds underneath his paws. She was like the wind, and the things he could smell on it. 

_ I respect boundaries, _ Lottie said clearly on the inside of his head, _ and I don’t read people’s minds. Unless I have to. _

“Got it,” Harry said, weakly. She shrugged, the sparkles in her coat catching on the streetlight. They sold winter coats with _ sparkles? _

She turned away. Harry managed to not back up like a cub confronted with a bear, but only _ just. _Harry could see the arch of Louis’ eyebrows, his quirk in the side of her mouth. 

Lottie jerked her head toward the interpack house, a sprawling former church basement that held the faint, wolfish memory of coffee, and donuts, and sleepy gatherings. It was starting to smell like eggplant lasagne. She started marching toward it. Meeting time was here, no going back. Harry drew in a breath.

“_ Wow _,” Liam said, with very deep admiration.

“He won’t be falling into your head, so you can stop freaking out. We’ve got better things to do right now than fixate on your pack,” Lottie called back over her shoulder. “Or at least, you can stop freaking out about _ that _.” 

*** 

**L. **

Candace, yarn in one hand and a cookie in the other, summarized the plan for the visitors while everyone settled at the table, plates of food in hand; Louis didn’t even have to move from the chair that he’d claimed before the meeting began. 

Lottie, sympathetic to Louis’ weird ways even in the ways that he couldn’t articulate, had thought to bring him to the meeting room early and pointed him to the best chair. It had a very comfortable corner in it, and arms on either side which made him feel sheltered. The two of them hung out for a good hour in the room before everyone came, sending images back and forth in their minds. It was as good as anything, it was like being able to read a book with somebody else in stereo, making a movie out of your head. Louis loved it. 

This another piece of the strange wonderful newness, that he could _ love _ the inside of his head. It was warm, it was like a candle lit inside of him. The wolf had things to say about it that Louis kept one mental eye on. The wolf had so many feelings, up and up and up, and its own fast-tail-thumping joy as soon as they heard Gemma’s car. It was the feeling that _ pack _was less fractured than before. Louis did not know how to explain to his own emotions that things were more complicated than this. 

The east pack meeting room was mostly an eclectic assortment of chairs shoved up to a magnificent, formal, dark wood table. Wolves prioritizing comfort was not just a feature of the inn, Louis had learned. There were armchairs and small couches shoved into the corner of the table, there were strange cushioned stools and fat, low-down cushions. It was a curious mixture of silly and fancy. The thick wood of the table smelled like lemon polish and conversation. 

Louis stared at the grain of the table while everybody talked. There was food, brought by the inn pack, as was apparently a tradition. Niall had sat down directly across from them, Liam and Zayn nearby, and Louis hadn’t yet dared make eye contact. 

Of course he knew where _ Harry _was anyway. He could feel the pull of Harry’s mind, even as he could feel the absolute terror that Harry had at the idea that his mind might be doing anything. Out of the corner of his eye he had seen that Harry was wearing a grey shirt, his favorite jeans, the same ones he wore just a little bit too often by default. He looked the same, which was to say, beautiful. 

_ Your lot’s nervous. I like it, _Lottie thought at him. She had her knees up nearly to her chin and was chewing on one of Liam’s snacks. Louis knew without even asking that it was Liam’s--it was extremely green. 

_ I didn’t mean to make them nervous, _Louis thought back, alarmed. Candace and Gemma were trading back and forth on some bantering interpack conversation about something to do with tourists and Louis felt no obligation to pay attention to it. 

Lottie nudged a bowl of something warm and good-smelling at Louis. It was a kind of lasagne, he decided. Sisters were the best. 

_ I know, _Lottie thought smugly. 

_ This is like passing notes, _Louis thought back, picking up the fork and sticking it into the pasta. There was a strange vegetable in it but it was nice, grainy in a way he didn’t mind. 

“So the main business. What Louis is hearing,” Gemma said, and Louis tuned back in. 

Everyone was looking at Louis, _ not ideal, _he thought, but Lottie was by his side. 

He looked at Gemma first, and she smiled a little. 

“You want us to go after this wolf,” Gemma said, not really a question. It was why they had all come, because Louis didn’t just want to go. 

“It’s true,” Louis said clearly. “I think we can find this person that I’m hearing.” 

“Louis,” Gemma said, and Louis could hear a lot of things underneath it--a greeting, a question, a quiet and welcome acknowledgment that she was glad he had invited them. He could see it in her face, and something on the inside of his chest eased with it. “You realize this is remarkable, yeah? I mean, we all know that you’re capable of more. But no one has ever heard another wolf _ outside of the territory. _ Across miles, and then been able to know where they are?” 

“I know,” Louis said, with relative patience. _ No one has ever been like us, _Lottie reminded him, on the inside. “But I’m sure. I know it sounds made up, like, ooh, dreams--” 

“Nothing you have ever said, has sounded made up,” Gemma interrupted gently. 

“Ok,” Louis said, after a beat. “Well. I know it’s dreams. But the dreams tell me something. Like this is further, like if we just go on the trains, it’ll get stronger. I know. And I just…” He stopped, remembering. Translating between the emotion-forward sense of the dreams and the feeling of someone else’s head and into words was...complicated. “This person is like I used to be. I think I was, I was thinking a lot about what pulled me out here, before _ I _ knew that there were other wolves, and something about it--they’re out there. I think we should go find them.” He looked around, expectant, and he finally managed to look at Niall, and then Liam next to him, and he let just the faintest sliver of telepathy cross the table, and he could feel both of them _ on his side. _Louis caught his breath, and released it. 

“We believe you,” Niall said, and Louis _ missed him. _Niall had a bowl of the same pasta that Louis was eating, and he winked over it. Louis let his breath out again. 

“Yeah, of course we believe you,” Gemma said. “It’s not that we don’t--of course we care, if there’s someone out there, lost.” 

There was silence around the table, loaded, and Louis shifted in the chair. _ What are they not telling me? _He asked Lottie, but it was Gemma who answered. 

“There are some things about this, is all. A wolf without a pack,” Gemma hesitated, and Louis looked at her unblinking. There was no point pretending that this didn’t implicate him more than anyone; he was already caught up in it. He was the wolf who had been lost and then found. 

“I want to know things,” Louis said clearly, and the shifting expression on Gemma’s face was hard to read. He tuned into the wolf, who could catch it better. She felt responsible, hard on herself, _ disappointed. _He twitched back from it, surprised. It was about him and the way that he had left them, he was sure. 

Under the table, Lottie patted his knee. 

“A wolf without a pack can be dangerous,” Gemma said clearly. On her pack’s side of the table, Zayn had leaned forward, an unusual movement for him, and something that Louis felt like solidarity. Louis wasn’t the only one here without an idyllic past. 

Gemma made a motion with her hands out on the table, like a knife chopping. “Not just physically. It can disrupt the whole system, the whole--we’re not independent, we’re interdependent. Being telepathically linked comes with a lot of advantages and...some disadvantages.”

"Tell me what that _ means _," Louis said, frustration creeping in. 

“It doesn’t mean we don’t want to help, and find them,” Zayn said. Gemma fell silent. It was clear that Zayn was respected here, on this topic, and Louis shifted to look at him. Zayn smiled at him. Something like solidarity, in that smile. They could both feel the prickling awareness that they, more than anyone else in the room, had been _ lost. _

Zayn spread his hands out. He spoke matter-of-factly. “Pack protocols are in place for a reason. Lost wolves can go feral, dangerous. And if a lost wolf shims into the telepathic plane of a pack, it can disrupt things. It’s like a cascade, like….like dominoes knocking over. It means it's risky. Especially out of the woods. It means, if we leave the territory, we're even weaker. That's why we don't like to, you know? You remember how it felt. Like you could hardly breathe until you got to the woods.” 

Louis wasn’t sure if he was breathing now. He remembered the interweaving gold threads of his dreams, the beautiful tapestry of mind. He remembered the vulnerability of the telepathic plane--and even though he didn’t want to, he thought about the vivid, cutting feeling of Harry’s thoughts in his head, unexpected, unintentional. It could go right, and it could go wrong. 

“Except the dominoes are people’s minds,” Louis said. “_ Broken.” _

"If a telepathic plane gets broken, the pack loses their connection," Zayn said. "We get cut off from each other, and no one knows if it can be fixed." 

"It doesn't happen," Liam added. "Because we're so careful. Because new...new, strange wolves are...rare." He looked at Zayn and for an instant there was tenderness between them, something that Louis almost felt like he should look away from. "But not impossible. Never impossible." 

There was a heavy silence in the room as they processed all of this, the risk, the challenge, and what they would be taking on by going out and looking for this stranger. 

Louis had never known that this was the possibility of risk that Harry had accepted, that the _ whole pack _had accepted, by taking him in. It made their welcome more tender, and more careful, and even more impossible than it had before, in retrospect. 

Louis looked at the edge of the table. He hadn’t known any of this.

“I don’t think that will happen,” Harry said. Louis looked up, sharply. Harry wasn’t looking at him but Louis knew that he wanted to. Harry was further than the rest of the pack at the corner of the table, like he’d sat out of direct eyesight on purpose. “Nothing says it _ has _to happen like that. If there’s a lost wolf, I say we go for it. We owe them that. No one should--no one should have to left out there alone, if they want the help.” 

Harry bit his lip, stopping himself. “But I don’t have to come,” he said. Louis could feel the east pack shifting around them, Lottie’s quirked eyebrow and nudge into his side, but Harry continued on bravely, because of course he did. “Gemma and the others, everyone’s here to help. But I just wanted to say Louis should decide who comes.” 

Harry was frowning, and Louis wasn’t trying to read his mind, but the resolve of it seeped through anyway. Harry was brave, here and real, and so very desperate to be on Louis’ side of things that Louis had to look down at the table.

Louis sighed, but just a small sigh, sideways, and he could feel Lottie next to him and this strange, mixed pack all around him. Life was one door or another, every bright morning beginning again. He could be brave, again. After all, such was being a wolf, he was learning. 

“For this, all this wolf stuff, I think I need you all,” Louis said. “And I think--I want Harry, in particular, to come.” 

Louis was pretty sure his ears were burning, but he looked across the table anyway--really looked. Harry was looking back. His hair was longer, falling out from where he’d tucked it behind his ears. His big hands were folded over themselves on the table, and seeing them, Louis could imagine their warmth. The wolf inside of him hummed. _ Harry, who had carried him back to the inn, Harry, who fell over the front steps and into the snow, laughing, Harry, needling jokes and slow puns and a deep, deep concern with whether one was barefoot or not. _And Harry’s telepathy was there, humming back. Louis wasn’t sure if Harry even knew. 

“Really?” Harry asked, soft and surprised and sincere, so sincere that it hurt. “Why?”

Louis couldn’t look away from him. He was as beautiful as ever. It hurt to know how much Harry wanted to fix things, it hurt to know that Louis didn’t know _ how _anything between them could be fixed. But there was somebody else, and that was amazing. It was precious, to be able to worry about someone else, and not himself. 

“You can help,” Louis said. He felt Lottie nod beside him, affirming. They’d spent a long time talking this out, and then on the phone with Steve, and Louis was fairly certain he was right or at least--as right as you could be about something you didn’t fully understand. 

“Anything,” Harry said. Louis blinked. 

“You can help me,” he clarified, “My telepathy. Because it’s still...it’s still kind of. Broken. But you make it stronger, and so does Lottie, and together, I think it means something. I think that what happened with us--” Harry flinched at this, and Louis nearly did in response, but he pulled deep inside and stilled it, and carried on, because, _ bravery _\--“what happened with us has got you tangled up in my head somehow, and so we think we need you. I can feel it now, like this. It’s already clearer.” 

Louis focused. He thought about the wolf inside, he thought about that river. A thousand tangling golden lights, and the idea that the past was something no less beautiful for being different. And he thought about Lottie, and Harry, and everyone else that his wolf still whispered to in the dark--_ pack _ \--and the curling way that Harry’s thoughts still reached out to him. Louis didn’t know what any of it meant but he was tired of worrying about it. He didn’t want to think about _ why _any of it happened. He just wanted to know he could do something with it. 

He focused. Every wolf at the table heard him at once: _ I think we need to do this together. _

It was hard to argue with telepathy. Harry sat back in his chair, something on his face that Louis couldn’t interpret, but it felt like it was good. Louis breathed out again, just--letting himself be different. For now, and like this, it was going to be helpful. 

“All right,” Harry said. Louis wanted--a thousand things, that he wasn’t going to think about right now. 

“We brought bags,” Niall said, helpfully. 

“We brought kale,” Liam added. 

“We brought your shoes!” Niall said.

“This is going to be a real disaster,” Lottie said, sounding very cheerful about it. 

“Probably,” Louis admitted. The inn pack was already up from the table, pushing out of chairs in a happy noise of shuffling bags and hastily-devoured snacks. Ed was making noises about clearing out one of the station houses for them all, about an early morning train, Gemma was catching up with Candace like someone visiting a beloved aunt. Harry had left the table to put things away in tupperware, careful and avoidant, clearly trying to stay out of the way, even though he burned in the corner of Louis’ eye no matter where in the room he was. 

Louis found it hard to believe that he had set all of this in motion, that at least a small group of these wolves was going to leave the shelter of territory because _ he _said that they should. But here they were. 

“An _ adventure,” _Zayn said, looking very pleased indeed. He hadn’t gotten up from the table, sprawling out in make-everyone-do-the-work fashion, and he made an encouraging, ridiculous face at Louis. 

Louis looked back at him. It had been hard to leave every one of them, and Louis still didn’t know how that would unravel now, and whether he had a right to ask for any of it back. “I guess so,” he said. 

“Nice work,” Zayn said, one lost wolf to another, and Louis felt suddenly, like he just might.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey friends, what a year. I am sorry about the delay in this chapter, and yet also, so profoundly back-and-forth about being able to write this story in this time. But like last chapter, I'm choosing to post this on the off chance that it could bring some comfort, even despite my own frustrations with my ability to use words right now. I am still grateful for the space to have stories. I never meant to leave this story hanging in such long WIP limbo, but so many unanticipated crises both globally and in my own personal life and workplace have happened simultaneously. Nevertheless I take some comfort in the fact that many of my stories are about exactly this: we may not choose the circumstances around us, but we can damn sure choose to care about each other. Sending that care to you!

**L.**

Harry had written him so many letters that they couldn’t stand up in a single stack, and Louis had therefore made a small standing triangle out of them, two stacks leaning together over a third. Lottie found him looking at them, sat down next to him on the bed, and then pinched him on the arm more viciously than Louis thought was warranted.

_HEY, _Louis thought, the wolf snarling in his mind, defensive, stupid, torn between two packs and questioning the philosophical nature of belonging in the first place.

“Don’t even start with me, I was just trying to get you out of your head, it’s my job now,” Lottie said, slamming into his side in an aggression of sibling affection. Louis slung an arm around her, because Louis was learning that being an older brother meant that you always lost, every time, to such things. 

“You have a lot of jobs,” he said. “And it’s funny that a lot of them involve discomfort.” 

Lottie allowed it, sniffing. The wolf inside her was always grinning. “So that’s your Harry. Taller than I imagined.” 

“He’s not my anything,” Louis said. His trustworthy old bag was on the bed. Louis had turned away from packing things in it for the train ride tomorrow because it was all anxiety-provoking, and it made his ribs feel too close together. 

“Sure. He’s nicer than I thought, they were all very polite,” Lottie said, grudgingly. “I like Gemma. Head bitch in charge, we dig that.” 

Louis nodded, because being a person with a sister had revealed a full commitment to whenever Lottie said that kind of thing. 

“Do you feel the lost wolf?” Lottie asked. 

“Not really,” Louis said, not strictly true, because there was still something tugging at his internal organs. Like stage fright.

“Well you should go down there tonight, I can feel your Harry _ pining _ from here,” Lottie said. 

“Stop it,” Louis said, astonished. Their house was the biggest and emptiest and therefore it had made sense that the inn wolves had piled into the downstairs rooms. Louis supposed it made sense. And it also made sense that Louis did not intend to venture out of his own bedroom, because who needed a midnight snack after a potluck? Not Louis. 

“I thought you were against him. And I quote, ‘fuck that guy in his dumb waffle shirt.’”

Lottie pinched him again. “I’m reserving judgment, although I am reserving the right to be critical again. At any point.” 

“Hmm,” Louis said, pinching back except only very gently, a ghost of a pinch. He was getting the hang of the whole sibling thing, at least when it came to pinching. It was about the form of the thing more than it was about the content. It was like there was a ritual that they were supposed to go through and every time they did, it cast a small _ sibling _spell around them. 

“You want him to help, don’t you? You told us all that. But I’m gonna keep asking.” Lottie asked.

Louis reflected. Harry made his telepathy stronger, and so did Lottie, and with the two of them together in one house he could already feel the burning strength of it, like a radiator in his mind. “I think the telepathy needs whatever this link is between us, he makes it stronger, it becomes--” he said grudgingly. He shoved the feeling of it towards her: when Louis had walked into the inn and first met Harry he had felt _ grounded, _like he could put the bag down, the wolf running down the muscles of his arms, the wolf ready to run through the woods. With Harry here it was like he could run instead of walk. He could tell that it was all still more fragile than he wanted it to be. 

“I don’t mean help the telepathy,” Lottie said, “I mean help _ you. _ That’s different. Do you _ want _him to help?” 

“Yeah,” Louis said, staring at the letters, “Somehow. I still do.” 

“Well then. I’m against him, but I’m not against you liking people even when you’re mad at them,” Lottie said sagely. 

_ That’s ridiculous, _ Louis thought. _ And I can want him to help without wanting to ever occupy the same physical room as him again. _

“No it isn’t ridiculous, sorry to tell you, that’s what spending a lot of time with people is just _ like, _” Lottie said. “You learn that as a wolf in a pack. You learn that people are a lot of things at once. And you could be, too. You’ll learn that, the longer you’re here.”

Louis continued to look at the letter, the unformed thoughts in the back of his mind, carefully where Lottie couldn’t see them. Lottie made him feel less fragile, made him feel like if things went wrong with the inn pack, he wouldn’t crumple away in the cold night. It was a better place to be making decisions from. Still, even having family hadn’t meant that everyone got to know everything he was thinking. 

The weird thing about having the dreams of being alone, trapped, lost in a tangle of urban nightmare and far from the magic...the weird thing, Louis thought, was that this, too, had felt _ like home. _And this was the piece that he hid from Lottie, and would continue to hide for as long as he could. 

“Why are you so good to me, why are you so good about people,” Louis said, the ‘when I’m not’ going unspoken, although unspoken between them was like a funny joke, only unspoken when they wanted it to be.

“I’ve been socialized by the once a month shipments of fashion magazines that Ed brought here dutifully for my entire life, and then all of the essays that Candace made me read as a direct contradiction to that,” Lottie said. 

_ Whatever it is, guess it worked, _Louis thought. 

_ Still think it matters, the people that matter to you, _Lottie said inside his head. Her wolf was singularly unafraid. Louis didn’t know where she got it from. It made him want to be more that way. 

_ I’m not trying to be, _ he stopped, even the thoughts unclear. She waited. _ I just want to help. The person in my dreams. _

“I know you do,” Lottie said, and he felt the push from her mind too, a strange mirrored image of him, _ good. _He shied away from it and Lottie stopped.

“I just think it could make things easier. And I can tell you want to talk to him.” She leaned in, and tapped him on the head. “It could make all this whole hunting business easier. If, you know, our strongest telepath and the boy who makes his telepathy _ even stronger _can stand to be in the same room.” 

Louis sighed. He was doing that a lot these days. “You don’t know Harry yet if you think he’s going to make things _ easier,” _Louis said darkly. But he got up anyway, because pinches threatened, and packing was stupid when you were only going to bring the three shirts you had to your name, and you were pretty sure that your sister would repack them anyway. 

*** 

Of course Harry was just as beautiful as the first time Louis had seen him in the lobby of the inn drinking horribly sweetened tea. He was sitting in the armchair looking critically at the fire, like the technique of its construction offended him. There was no technique to the fires in the east pack house: they had an electric firepit that generated flame into the glass. Louis knew, immediately, that Harry and the other inn packmates hated it. The thought made him want to smile.

The wolf part of Louis had a solution to his strange feelings that involved crossing the cold room--to do what Louis wasn't sure, snap or glower or shove up, hideously vulnerable, into Harry's space, maybe rest his head on Harry's thigh and hope that Harry would put his hands on Louis' wolf head, tangle them up in his fur. 

_ I'm not listening, _ Lottie thought pointedly from the hallway, _ but even from a distance you feel like a marshmallow catching fire. I thought we were gonna be cool. _

_ I’m cool, _Louis lied. Lottie scoffed, out loud. Sisters were annoying, that was the truth. Louis shot her a mock glare, and she sent an image of a trash bag to his mind, and then the trash bag catching fire. Louis could not follow the intricacies of this. But the wolf felt better. 

“Hi,” Louis said, for want of anything more profound.

Across the room, Niall looked up and immediately smiled and waved. He was hunched over some workbook, and Liam was reading a magazine, and Zayn was apparently asleep on the floor. Louis missed them all horribly. 

“So,” Louis said. _ Killin’ it, _Lottie thought mercilessly. 

“So you have _ magic dreams _ now, absolutely crushing the werewolf badassery, nailing it,” Niall said, dropping the workbook on Liam’s back, ignoring the _ oof, _stepping over Zayn, and crossing the room to give Louis a hug. 

“It’s not magic, I wouldn’t call them magic, more like I don’t know how to stop them,” Louis said with as much authority as could be mustered by a person taken emotional ambush by a hug, and wilting into it. “It’s _ telepathy, _you know, that thing that you all do. I just do it a little more. A little weirder. I just--someone’s out there. You know.” 

“Sure, a little more magic, still very cool weirdness,” Niall said. He smelled like brown sugar--there was a tin of brown sugar on the carpet and the inn wolves all had some kind of spiced tea in mugs, every single one of them, even Zayn, who had a tendency to despise tea. Caffeinated, Louis could smell it. 

“Have you been ok?” Niall said. “Magic and all?” 

“You’re not going to be able to sleep,” Louis said. “We should probably be well-rested for tomorrow.” 

“That’s my line,” Liam said. Louis didn’t know why they were still all _ smiling _at him. He patted Niall back a little more.

“Sleep is for the weak,” Niall said, patting Louis’ back, showing no signs of letting go. “I’m so glad you finally came down.” 

“Me too,” Liam said, and Zayn smiled as well. Louis could feel Harry on the edges, tentatively watching them, and the _ tug _of his mind in the room pulled back, like a broom balanced badly on the wall and about to slip off. 

_ Marshmallow, _ Lottie thought, teasing, and he could feel that she was going upstairs and leaving him to the mercy of the wolves. _ No, _he wailed plaintively, and she sent back the remarkably visceral image of a tree branch springing unexpectedly back along a path, rapping his wolf’s ear. 

“Really?” Louis asked.

“Louis,” Niall said, “Why are you frowning? Are you feeling excited about tomorrow? Nervous? It’s gonna be great. Did you know the train has _ bunk beds? _Are you a bottom bunk or a top bunk kind of wolf, do you think?”

“Niall,” Zayn sighed, “You don’t just ask people if they prefer the bottom or the top of a--” 

“Why’d you take so long to come down?” Liam asked, worriedly, and Harry made a pained noise, and Zayn punched him lightly, because _ Liam. _

“Um,” Louis said, articulately. They were delightful, and infuriating, and absolutely mad--Louis was never going to know what to do with them. He’d thought maybe that the whole--the whole entire _ feeling _ of it, inn and wolves and boys looking at him like he _ mattered, _he’d thought maybe that time and distance and finding more of his own family would have changed that. But it hadn't; having Lottie changed his life, but having Lottie didn’t mean that he no longer felt the hole where the inn was. It was all very confusing, too many things in parallel, and Louis caught his breath around it. 

“Wait. Did you think we would be mad?” Niall asked seriously. The seriousness was only slightly mitigated by the way that he was now holding Louis’ head between his hands and looking at him, jokingly, like Louis was a curio at the antiques store. 

“I mean,” Louis said, not to state the obvious. Of course he had thought they would be mad. He had thought they might be furious: pack was meant to be _ together, _and Louis had rejected that, and them, and all of the quiet and wonderful nights playing board games in the inn, and he hadn’t even tried to explain it. 

He had left, and he hadn’t even said goodbye.

“We’re not mad, not even a little,” Niall said. He dropped Louis’ head but he didn’t step back. He made one face, and then another, and Louis cracked a smile against his own instincts. Niall’s voice got softer and more careful. “Louis. We would never have been mad.” 

“I mean,” Louis said, half-annoyed with himself being unable to cough words up again because he was _ better than this now, _ cooler, more used to the presence of other people who wanted to talk to him. Only apparently that same old stillness could come over him and it was unexpected, choking up the back of his throat, so many _ feelings _ . It was hard to be around them again. It was hard, and lovely, and he had missed them _ so much _and they had come when he asked even though nothing had really been answered.

“‘S true,” Zayn said softly from where he was now close by but still on the floor, sprawling. Louis could feel the warmth of him from just a few inches away. They were all just holding the space, and Louis nodded, and didn’t say anything, and swallowed hard, the lump in his throat gradually easing. 

Zayn nudged Louis’ foot, a funny little tap. The wolf inside Louis’ chest felt the _ click-click _into place of tangible comfort from all of them, like a secret language. “You totally should’ve run away. You totally should’ve been mad. It’s cool. We understood. We shouldn’t have let you down. I would’ve run away, if I’d been you.” 

“I bet you would’ve,” snorted Liam, but fondly. He smiled at Louis, and Louis felt his heart swell nearly to bursting. It was another strange thing, in a life that had become a revelation of strange, gentle things: maybe conflict wasn’t the end. Maybe even conflict was part of being understood, sometimes.

He loved them, he realized, he loved them all. He was filled to the brim with the feeling of it.

“You don’t have to say anything about, you know,” Niall said, and that was like filling in a missing piece, like sliding a piece of cardboard under the wobbling leg of an unbalanced table. “Louis, there are other important things to discuss. Did you know that the train has a _ snack car?” _

“Ok, well then,” Louis said, happy suddenly, and smiling back at them. “First of all, what’s a snack car?” 

**H.**

“When you think...very loudly,” Louis said, “I can’t help but overhear it.” 

“Oh,” Harry said. “I’m sorry,” and then he winced, because apologizing was some kind of reflex and he was trying to dampen it. Louis made a face at him.

“I really know that you are,” Louis said, “But if we’re going to do all this, we should probably figure out how to just go on.” 

The other wolves had shuffled off to bed. There had been a chaos of tea and stolen blankets and Candace somewhere above them giving firm instructions about shower handles. The tension in the air had broken and there was a spring hint to the night air, his wolf’s nose telling him there were flowers coming up under the windowsills. Bulbs turning into leaves.

Harry had lingered in the downstairs and so had Louis, neither of them looking at each other. Louis had accepted Niall’s not-even-a-little-finished mug of tea against his own better judgment. 

“I know, and I do want to get on,” Harry said, trying to look casual, “But can we still talk about something?” 

Louis sized him up over the mug. Harry didn’t drop his gaze, and felt his ears warm. Harry had the peculiar sense that Louis might be having a conversation with someone else at the same time, and given even the small amount he’d seen of Lottie, that seemed a real possibility. 

“Oh, ok, fine,” Louis said, clearly reluctant, but with the face of someone who has accepted this continuing existence in the presence of people who want to _ talk _. 

“I don’t want you to do anything for me, not to make me feel better,” Harry plowed on, but carefully, “I’m not trying to ask any work from you. It’s only that I want to go on in the right way on this trip. I’ve just come to realize that despite growing up wolf, despite everything I was lucky enough to have, I don’t honestly know if I should be trusted to know how the telepathy works. Or whether I’m doing it right, you know? So please, just, tell me if I do anything that makes it break, or wrong, or--”

“You aren’t, and it won’t,” Louis said, “Lottie and I have been working on the telepathy a lot. I’m nothing like how I was.” 

“Well,” Harry said, “I hope not _ nothing _like you were.” 

Louis looked at him, but there was a ghost of a smile in the corner of his mouth. 

“I mean who would beat me at all the word games?” Harry asked.

“Oh that’ll still be me,” Louis allowed, and he sounded warmer, more relaxed, more at ease. It felt like a moonbeam coming in the window, and Harry smiled at him. “But look, I wanted to tell you to stop worrying. Even though we’ve got this--” he waved his hand in the direction of Harry, and Harry watched it until Louis dropped it, and morphed the gesture into a helpless shrug. “This thing, where we’re swapping uncontrolled telepathy, and I’m trying not to listen to _ yours, _but if you can, just, stop worrying.” 

“Not likely,” Harry said non-confrontationally, only ruefully. He huffed softly, running a hand through his hair. Louis was looking at him without fear and without anger and not exactly with warmth, but then again, Louis had always had a mask about his face when there was a great deal of stuff going on under the surface. Harry had just always been able to hear the thoughts that went along with it, he realized, and it was like a new kind of learning to have only the external words to piece together. The wolf inside Harry’s chest paced, curled, watched.

“Well, maybe it won’t matter soon, anyway,” Louis said. 

“What does that mean?” Harry asked, frowning.

“Nothing,” Louis said quickly, which ranked somewhere around Liam and Zayn’s ‘_ we’re not bickering’ _ in terms of its convincingness, but fine. 

“I would stop our telepathic link if I could,” Harry said. It didn’t feel like _ anything _to him, Louis just frustratingly opaque, all of that magical frisson gone.

“I know,” Louis said. “I mean, I did read your letters.” 

_ Really? _ Harry didn’t mean for the thought to flash out so abrupt, bright and embarrassingly loud, so loud that even Harry with his returned-to-bog-standard normal wolf telepathy knew that Louis must have felt it ricochet across the room. But Louis didn’t look upset about it. He didn’t look _ happy, _but it was a feeling that Harry couldn't read, just the wrinkle between his brows which had the potential to be as much Louis’ natural state of contemplation as it was any pointed worrying. Louis seemed to have so many things on his mind and they were all inaccessible. Harry curled his fingers into his own palms and pressed them in. 

“You really did?” Harry prompted, realizing that Louis wasn’t going to honor the telepathy with a response.

“I really read your letters,” Louis said patiently.

“What, all of them?” Harry asked dumbly, because that had been a lot of letters, a stupid amount. They had started to pour out of him after a certain point of nonresponse. It had been Harry sitting in the kitchen night after night with his feet balanced precariously on a wooden crate full of pickled onion jars, writing until his hand cramped. He had thought something stupid about it, like, maybe if he could be honest about absolutely everything that had happened in their time together, maybe he could exorcise the lie from between them. Not to forget it--_ never to forget it, _ Harry had written in one of the letters, or really in multiple of them, he had a sneaking suspicion he had spent a week on this theme alone-- _ not me, I am going to remember this always, but to imagine a way of getting past it. It’s like sometimes, mistakes make you so much better at seeing what matters. You never needed that, but I did. _

“Yeah, of course,” Louis said. He seemed different, solid in the light of the fire, not shifting but planted on the carpet with a quiet certainty. Harry liked it. 

“I don’t know if I would stop it if I could,” Louis said. This caught Harry by surprise even more. Louis then cheated at the situation by lifting his mug up and burying his sharp, somewhat infuriating face in the tea, so that Harry didn’t even have the vague clue of his expression. 

“What do you mean?” Harry asked. 

Louis looked down into his mug. It was boring, and grey, and had no pictures or slogan. Harry had missed Louis so much that he had to imagine his arms and legs were weights, sinking into the east pack chair. 

“Do you feel like letting me show you?” Louis asked slowly, tapping the side of his head.

“Yes, what? Do you think you could? Is that a thing you can do?” Harry said, wrapping one hand over the other and pulling his knees up. He _ would _stay in the chair, moon dammit. 

“I think so,” Louis said, “I’m not sure why I think so. But I’m pretty sure.” 

“I’m sure you can too,” Harry said promptly, and Louis rolled his eyes a little, but he was smiling so it was worth it. 

“Come on then,” Harry said, not moving. 

“I’d probably have to touch you,” Louis said quietly. “Is that ok?” 

“Yes,” Harry said, feeling the importance of asking, and feeling his own shame, regret, worry, _ hope, _crowding up the back of his neck.

Louis stepped closer. He put a hand out, and Harry waited, and then Louis came even closer, and brought his hand toward the side of Harry’s head and then rested it gently, achingly gently, against Harry’s hair. Harry could barely feel the warmth of his fingers. He tried not to breath in too loudly, tried not to listen to the wolf part of himself that wanted to pull Louis down into his lap and into the chair, and waited. He missed everything about Louis, and he didn’t even know how to tell him. 

Harry looked at Louis expectantly. Louis looked back at him, and then he closed his eyes. 

_ The wolf was alive, more than alive. It had been the whole time, and fighting, just under the surface, for so many years that Harry could feel them, stretching back through nerve fibers and muscle, pulling like a symphony of experience that wasn’t his. Like he had stolen into it, like he had followed the sound of it on the air, and it had pulled him under. _

_ The wolf had been so lost, for so long. Harry gasped. To be a wolf without a pack was something that everything inside of Harry didn’t know how to grapple with, and he tried to fight it at first, like the shock of falling into cold water. But he waited, and the water cleared. The wolf was on the edge of the water and Harry cast his mind toward it and Harry was it--the wolf was alive, more than alive. _

_ The wolf was nothing like Harry had ever known even on a full moon. They were in the woods, but the woods were something new. The wolf minds ran through them in the way that Harry knew, but there was something else--not just in the trees but suddenly ABOVE the trees. _

_ This was the woods, like Louis saw the woods. A network of gold, traced on the branches. This was the glimmer of magic that had only been a faint suggestion before, whispering out on the wind. It was visible now. Harry could see it, through the eyes of Louis’ wolf. Where people had gone, there were interlocking paths. Where people had gone as wolves, there was silver and gold. There were messages in the paths, forest and wolf, ancient and new. There was information here, layered deep. Towering above Louis, the sense of his mind like a weathervane, pulled by all of the noise. He couldn’t read any of it. Not yet. But it was coming into shape, something growing, something vast. _

_ To see it, the wolf had to be separate from it. Separate from all of them, maybe--above the pack and the trees and the fine-grained beautiful soft dirt. To see the forest, the wolf had to look past the trees. _

Harry opened his eyes. “It’s incredible,” he said, finding it hard to breathe. “Is that what you see, in the telepathic plane? Is that what your wolf can see? Is this what you and Lottie can do?” 

“Sometimes,” Louis said, looking flushed, drinking tea, and tapping his fingers. “Lottie can’t--she’s a little more east pack. There’s something off about my brain. Well, _ you know,” _he looked at Harry a little bit accusatory, and Harry wrinkled his nose and looked at the floor, still conscious that Louis was close, close enough that Harry could hear his heartbeat with the wolf’s acuity. 

“I don’t know everything, just little pieces,” Harry said quietly. Louis shrugged, allowing that. 

“I don’t know, I’m still working on it. I think it’s been there the whole time, but it wasn’t until you and I--it wasn’t until I left and met Lottie, that all of it started to become real. It’s how I keep hearing the lost wolf. It’s like, if I could just get the range further, I could--I don’t know what it could be. But it feels like I can see so much, you know?” 

Harry shook his head. He didn’t know at all, because Louis was differently incredible and strange, and nobody was going to know what kind of rules made sense here, but it wasn’t Harry’s job to say that either. Harry wanted to say that he was proud of him--it was so extraordinary to be sitting here and having this conversation, to have watched _ Louis _lead a pack meeting and insist on the things that he wanted to have happen, to watch two packs listen to him--but it wasn’t anything like Harry’s right to do that, so he shut the words up and saved them for later.

“I’ve started to get to this other level of being able to hear, or see, or sense things,” Louis said, “But it’s all still a little shaky. You felt that, right? That it’s shaky?” 

Harry nodded. Louis’ mind felt like Louis looked here and now: strong, vibrant, but something graceful and sharp about it. And it had felt like something that could scare Harry, if he let it. No one’s single mind could keep up with the entirety of the woods. It was just like Louis to _ try. _

“Well I don’t know if I can get it to work,” Louis sighed, sounding pragmatic and a little annoyed, like when Liam had taught him how to load a dishwasher the first time. “But I guess it’s a thing, you know? Wolves like me. Actually a thing.” 

“Whatever kind of wolf you are it’s something else,” Harry said, “Something amazing.” 

Louis shrugged, but Harry saw his face look happy for the first time, shyly, quietly happy, precious and self-contained and private.

“Yeah, maybe there’s a bit to it all that isn’t broken,” Louis said. 

“Felt like a memory, not like a problem,” Harry said. This was an understatement. It had felt like another universe. 

“I thought maybe what was happening with us and the telepathy sharing was because my telepathy just kept...spilling over. It wasn't something broken about me, it was just something that didn't know how to work,” Louis said. The tea was done, and he set it down on a side table and frowned at it. Harry could tell Louis was probably telling himself to just leave the mug there, but that he would be categorically incapable of doing so and was probably going to do a round of cleaning before they left the house in the morning. 

“That makes a certain kind of sense,” Harry said, “It’s kind of like the way that you used to transform, right? You had to hold it all back for so long and then it would just like, rip out of you at the full moon. So if that’s it, then it should get...better.” He held back a wince at the thought. It was stupid, petty, and selfish, but he wanted it still. He had never deserved it in the first place, but still. 

“Yeah, I dunno,” Louis said, “The telepathy is a pack thing, and you guys were the first pack I ever met, I think it just went a little haywire, with meeting you. I think we’re on the path to fixing it now. Or maybe not fixing. Maybe just, getting on.” 

“Are you going to be careful, when we go out there?” Harry asked. Louis looked back at him for a long time, and Harry continued, rambling on, stupid and earnest and unable to stop caring. “The pack is--what they said is true, you know, that lost wolves can disrupt the pack. But it goes the other direction. That packs can protect a wolf, when you find someone who’s lost.” 

“Well that’s good,” Louis said, “Lottie’s part of this one. You’re part of the inn. Everyone will be ok.” 

“What about you?” Harry asked, and it was his voice that came out breathless this time. 

“I,” Louis said, “Have been ok without a pack for a very long time.” 

Louis glanced toward the mug, convinced himself he was going to leave it there again, and moved toward the upstairs, bed and the end of the whole conversation. And Harry knew that he should let it go. 

“Was everything else a mistake, too?” Harry said, swallowing around the enormous sticky sensation in his throat. Some words were harder to get out than others. He had stood up out of the chair before he realized it, balancing in a leaning, lopsided way against the cushion, forgetting the whole thing about the weights. “I mean kissing you,” Harry plowed on bravely, “Because I fucked up, I know how much I fucked up but that is a level of fuck up that I don’t think I could--I just want to know. I just. Just tell me if I fucked that up too, if you actually didn’t want--” 

“I wanted that,” Louis said, hands clasped together. “I mean. At that moment, no, it didn't feel like you weren't asking. It still…” he winced, and it shuddered straight through Harry to see the expression on his face look that guarded and uncertain, “...I still should've known about the telepathy. But I know you listened to the actual words I was saying, too.” 

“Moon,” Harry said, “Ok yeah you're right, of course, but fuck, thank moon.” It hurt, and it was a relief, and he felt almost weak with it. It had been so brutally terrible to wonder which lines he had crossed when, and he knew that he had fucked it up in so many other ways but at least not that. 

“You don’t have to worry about it all, about us, I’m not going to be weird about it,” Louis said, voice small and arms crossed tightly over his chest. Harry didn’t have the telepathy anymore but something about it still clicked against the way that he knew Louis anyway.

“It’s not weird to have feelings about it,” Harry said, but Louis frowned deeply, and his arms got tighter. He wasn’t really looking at Harry but looking at the carpet instead. Harry could see the fire tracing on the outline of his profile. But even if Harry didn’t have a window into Louis’ mind now, he could still tell when it felt like he was holding onto things because he was afraid they might come out of him, otherwise. 

And he hadn’t joined the east pack after all. Harry didn’t know why, and he wouldn’t have begrudged it, but everything really did smell wrong here. 

“I mean, if you _ do _have feelings about it, we could talk--”

“What an original solution, more _ talking,” _Louis said, snapping his teeth in a wolfish way, but Harry remembered the night they had spent in the woods and the feeling of Louis’ wolf creeping toward him and he couldn’t let it go at that. 

“Just so you know, I think about kissing you,” Harry said, “All the time. And your face when someone puts new food in front of you and you don’t know whether you’re going to like it or not. And how good you are at board games, even the hard ones. And all the big words you use--”

“I don’t, they’re normal words,” Louis said, breathless, wolfish, unable to respond to anything but this most trivial of the list-- 

“They’re absurd words,” Harry said, stepping just a bit closer. But he stopped himself when he reached the table with the empty mug, and redirected himself picked it up. Even though Harry’s default language was always going to be physical, he knew he hadn’t earned anything like that yet. Louis watched Harry move. He picked up the other dishes on the floor, the blanket that Zayn had discarded, the knitting magazine on the corner of the sofa. 

“I think about it too,” Louis admitted. He tilted one head, and Harry could nearly imagine the ear poking up out of his hair. If they could only be wolves all the time, they could’ve solved this a long time ago. Harry reminded himself that they all needed to live in human form too. 

“I _ miss _you,” Harry said, “And I’m just. So sorry.” 

Louis blinked. “I know you are. And it’s _ fine. _ It doesn’t _ matter.” _

Neither of these things seemed true. But Louis was already moving out of the living room and pulling himself up the stairs by the handrail, like he was so done talking that he was going to leap right off the ground floor. And yet he had said _ I think about it too. _Harry didn’t understand multilayered forests, strange telepathy stretching out over miles, or what was supposed to come next in the Harry Styles’ Grand Plan of Fixing All of This. But for now, he turned off the insultingly electric fire with its asinine smell of hot glass, gathered the dishes into the kitchen sink, and waited for morning.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> me, rising from the swamp of 2020 to chuck a few scattered papers to the shore, ink smearing across the lines, before i sink back down and vanish with a muddy gurgle

The train was a thing of beauty. Louis loved it as soon as he saw it. It was an incongruous feeling to have in the middle of shivering anticipation and nervousness and a very insistent recurring thought that went like  _ wouldn't life be better if we were spending it alone in an armchair somewhere reading instead?  _ that tangled him up, uncomfortably, like wearing too-large shoes. And yet, when he rounded the corner with Lottie and saw the train, another feeling clicked into place. 

It was excitement. It was wolf. The wolf was extremely pleased at the idea of movement and adventure and  _ seeking.  _ There hadn’t been any dreams at all the previous night, but Louis knew the lost wolf was out there, waiting, even if the lost wolf didn’t know there was anything to wait for. Louis took in a deep breath. He had been that wolf, after all. 

“What,” Louis said to Lottie. “We have a  _ train.  _ This pack stuff is kind of amazing. The economics are just beyond anything that makes sense. Do we have to buy tickets?”

“Tickets? Don’t be ridiculous. How did you think we would get around when we need to move a whole pack together?” Lottie asked, practical, “Two packs in this case plus whatever we find out there. Did your city people not have trains?”  _ _

Louis knew better at this point than to try to answer that. “I’m going to lodge a complaint that no one told me I could’ve had free train rides,” he said instead. “I spent a lot to get out to this part of the country in the first place, at Christmas.” 

Lottie looked dark at that, and protective, and Louis felt the brush of her mind and sent a nudge back.  _ Joke, it’s fine.  _ It wasn't only a joke of course, but it  _ was _ fine.

“Ed threatened to make me tour colleges like this,” Lottie said. 

“What,” Louis said, “Are you going to college?” 

Lottie flapped her free hand in the air. In his mind, he felt her gentle reassurance. “Like your buddy Liam, apprenticeship, sometimes a class or two at the local. Some of us have ambitions. But you know I like the pack. I love being here. You could do classes too. You could learn whatever you wanted." 

"Why when I could just  _ free train  _ everywhere," Louis said, a real joke this time. 

She didn’t push it, but Louis knew she wanted to. The wolf inside his chest thumped its eager agreement with its tail. Now that Louis could change more easily it really wanted to be there all the time.  _ Pack, pack, pack.  _ What could the world be with one? One step at a time.

“Hmm,” Louis made a noncommittal noise. It was obvious that none of the wolves wanted to be without a pack, none of the wolves but Louis, and this held even for Lottie. He sighed. 

The train was tall, and long, and gleaming in the morning light even though it was dark colors, mostly made up of blacks and greys and metals that looked solid enough to bore through a mountain, but it also had colors—yellow on the window panes, and a vibrant red paint splashed up the sides of the cars. It looked wonderful, like something from a book. The side plating had swirling font letters that looked old-fashioned and preposterous, spelling out  _ Lupus Express. _

“Is there nothing that werewolves can’t make into terrible self-centered commentary,” Louis said.

“Nothing,” Lottie said stoutly. “It is our destiny.”  
  
“They should’ve named this the dogpile,” Louis said. “We’re all going to be sleeping in this?"

“This was your idea."

"It was my idea to go find the wolf with like, you, and Harry," Louis said, "And my very awful telepathy. I thought we would take a  _ car." _

"Telepathy is stronger in pack form, and telepathy works better when we stay connected to the earth through the rails. That’s why we train, besides the fact that people are less likely to get carsick,” Lottie said. Louis looked at her, hard, because that seemed like another terrible dog joke, but Lottie lifted her eyebrows and her mind said  _ really.  _

“I like cars,” Louis said, sniffily. 

“You’re so fancy now,” Lottie said. “I packed an entire battalion of soaps and hand cream for you. You’ll live.”

Louis laughed a little, because the previous night he had kicked off his blankets in the middle of all the dreams and when he’d woken up cold he hadn’t thought to pick them up off the floor and put them back on because it hadn’t occurred to him that there  _ would  _ be blankets. He was starting to learn how to take things like comfort for granted. But sometimes he still slipped up on it and forgot. 

“Oh god, think of the bathrooms,” Louis said. 

“Ed says there’s everything, showers,” Lottie promised. She squeezed his hand, another form of promise. He squeezed back. Going out into the unknown with someone was...a universe apart from going off into the unknown with only yourself. 

Louis did not look around for Harry but that was an altogether different feeling, like he both wanted and didn't want to find him. Every moment that Harry wasn’t there, there was simply a Harry-shaped absence in everything. 

“It’s a very nice train. There are small beds with real mattresses and I insisted that you and I get a car to ourselves, you being the VIP of this trip. Excited to fall out the top bunk when you have a really weird dream.”

“I’ll have the top bunk then,” Louis said, apologetic and suddenly awkward, ducking his head unconsciously and feeling the back of his neck go warm. There would definitely be dreams. He could feel them like very tiny tacks pushing their way into his brainstem. With the impending journey in front of them the dreams had only gotten longer and more real. And  _ I’m not the-- _ “I’m not, you know, special.” 

They’d been practicing getting Louis to share more of his thoughts a little more immediately, and with less fear of punishment or less of the unholy terror that someone might disagree with him. That had come out quickly, with an edge like insistence, and he was surprised and a little pleased with himself. 

So was Lottie, which she expressed with a small smile and kicking snow at Louis’ barely exposed ankle, expertly in the sliver between his pants and his foot where the warming slush-snow could fall into his shoe. 

“Hey,” Louis yelped.

“I get to say who’s special on my train.  _ I’ll _ have the top bunk,” she said with a half-convincing half-snap, “You hate sleeping up high. It was a good idea, you know. We’re gonna have fun. We’re gonna  _ find  _ this dream stranger.” 

She was so, so bossy. Louis wondered whether anybody else in their family might have been. He was surprised to find the thought gentle, almost peaceful, instead of the usual way that thinking about his past felt. Lottie was a miracle on his life, and the light from finding her had flooded backwards onto everything. He didn't know how to tell her this, so he didn't. 

"Ugh," Louis said,  _ fine.  _

_ Fine,  _ Lottie thought triumphantly. She had brought along makeup and magazines and a laptop and Louis had brought his trusty bag and a phone full of music. They had brought each other too, and this was lovely. 

“I’m sorry about the dreams,” Louis said. 

_ Shut it, you know they're useful,  _ Lottie thought, rolling her eyes, and, “We’ll throw the mattress on the floor and that way I can hit you with a pillow to wake you up.” 

_ They're more confusing than useful _

_ Well when you're a magical werewolf, those things do go together _

"I suppose with great power," Louis said, trying out a bit of smugness for the novelty.

_ Do you think I’m making a very big mistake dragging everybody out here for something I’m feeling,  _ he said telepathically, in a big rush, letting go of her hand in case it was some kind of sibling-cheating-tactic to use body language to influence someone’s responses toward the things you wanted them to do. Louis didn’t know. He didn’t know what it was  _ like,  _ another person with their own window on a shared experience, and the willingness to share it.  _ Do you think maybe it’s just--  _

He couldn’t say it in words so he said it in flashed images--a shattered glass window that he’d seen in the back of an alley. That cold, and creeping feeling when the days had started getting shorter in the city and the moon had risen through a haze of pollution. The sick unsettled question,  _ is what I feel even real?  _

_No, _Lottie thought back, letting his hand go easily. _I don’t think_ _you’re making any kind of mistake. And if we go out there and there’s nobody, then, it’ll be ok. _

Lottie ran back to the car to grab a bag from Ed in a cacophony of motion and energy. It was in fact true that Louis hated sleeping up high--he had had a bunk bed in one of the homes he tried not to think about very often, and that had been miserable, his wolf hunched anxiously in the night and the feeling that it wasn’t so much a bed as it was a cliff. 

Louis watched Lottie wrestle the bag and cast a withering, calculated glare at some forlorn east pack member who was clearly washed up on the shore of fruitless Lottie-love. And Louis didn’t understand how she understood him, but he thought,  _ this is what it feels like.  _

There was red again—not on the train this time, but a car pulling in around the corner of the parking lot—Gemma’s car, coming up from the east pack house. The wolf had  _ feelings  _ about it. Louis felt his stomach flip, and never come back the right way again. He tried hard not to think about it. He looked back at the train. He could do this. He missed them all with an ache that was fierce and stupid; Liam and Niall and Zayn and Gemma and—and Harry, obviously, Harry—and he hadn’t solved any piece of that impossible equation and he didn’t know if any of this was a good idea.

_ It won’t be that bad,  _ Lottie thought, with a quick flick of asking permission before she slid the thought into his head from a distance, and Louis took the thought just as easily. Lottie had a feeling in his head that he was starting to recognize, and he liked it—layers of colors, an easy motion, alive and incredibly unique and at the same time, unpredictable.  _ I’m here this time. _

_ And I’m glad you’re here, _ Louis thought, hoping that was ok to say, and Lottie smiled at him and he thought with a sense of awe as he did so many times these days,  _ that’s my little sister. _

Harry stumbled out of the car. Louis' heart clenched. Harry had a bag over his shoulder and a tupperware in one hand. It was probably full of something delicious. Louis hoped he hadn’t stayed up all night baking--the kitchen had smelled suspiciously good that morning. Louis turned back to face the train. There was something very interesting in the wheels, and he focused on it. 

_ Not yours,  _ he reminded his wolf, which felt harder to control despite all their progress. It couldn't be that anyone got to have everything they wanted, after all. Harry and the others were going to pile into their own part on the train, and Louis was going to have to stop having these gigantic washes of  _ stupid  _ that flooded into the tips of his fingers every time he saw them, and this fragile, dumb feeling like being hurt that they were no longer in a place where Harry seek him out in every room, in every new place. Louis had taken them out of that place, anyway. 

There was a subtle throat-clearing behind him. Ok, not that subtle. 

“I made,” Harry was suddenly  _ there,  _ and the wolf felt very, very pleased with it--Louis stilled, slush dripping into his sock-- “I made some sugar cookies. Have one. You know, if you want one.” 

Harry was holding out the tupperware as far as he could, with a face that was similar to the morning sun, except a little more embarrassed. Not as strong as it could’ve been, but very full of a promise, different to the promise of Lottie’s hand-squeeze.    


“Don’t overbalance,” Louis said, willing his brain to  _ shut up  _ on its current apparently eternal quest to define every nuance of human (wolf) emotion _ . _

Harry smiled at him, helplessly. Louis took a cookie. His hands weren’t shaking, not even a little, not even though Harry was still smiling, a lost kind of smile like he didn’t know where to put it.

“Hi again,” Louis said. 

“Hi again,” Harry said. Oh, they were functional.

“You’re still here.” 

“Wouldn’t miss the east pack train,” Harry said

“Are there  _ more special trains?”  _ Louis asked, incredulous, and Harry only laughed but Louis was certain that meant there were. Ludicrous.

“I won’t bite. Much.” Louis said. Harry relaxed his arm and shuffled a little closer so he didn’t fall. He smelled like the  _ inn,  _ and the flannel threads of his shirt, clean but worn, boy-that-was-Harry, brown hair hastily washed in to-hot water. Louis tried to blink it away and wasn’t successful _ . _

“And it’s  morning ,” Louis continued, reaching for an adequate topic like a cat fumbling for a piece of dry landing in an overflowing bathtub. “When could you have possibly had time for baking?” 

“Is this your way of telling me you have a brand-new rigid breakfast routine? Louis,  _ all food is equivalent,  _ Tomlinson? Do you only eat oats now, or something?” Harry said, but softly and through his teeth. Louis looked at him sideways as he bit into cookie--soft, enticing, sugar that melted just fast enough--

“All food isn’t equivalent anymore. I said no to something the other day,” Louis said. 

“Gasp,” Harry literally said the word, out loud, like a jackass, and Louis rolled his eyes.

“I don’t have rules about breakfast but I have come up with some rules for us getting on.” 

“Oh, ok,” Harry said immediately, though he sounded surprised. “I’m really going to try not to get in the way. I’ll wear long sleeves and listen. I won’t interrupt--well, ok, I’m working hard at the interrupting--I can keep to the far corner of the train, try not to disrupt the telepathic signal, you know--” 

Louis sighed, and shook his head. If he tried, the wolf could just feel the edge of the murmur of Harry’s thoughts, _be ok, be ok, I want it to be ok, _but he’d put a heavy barrier in place that morning and it was getting easier all the time, and he refused to be distracted by that. “You make everything inside of my head louder, when you’re closer, and you make everything that my weird head can do work better,” he said plainly. “I think I need you _in_ _the way.”_

He took a second sugar cookie from the tupperware without asking, because he was pragmatic enough to think that if he was going to have to embarrass himself in front of boys he’d rather not be talking to, he might as well get cookies out of it. “And I said  _ I  _ had rules. Not that I wanted to hear what you thought the rules should be.”    
  
“Oh,” was all Harry said, but he said it leaning forward, and listening. He was surprised and Louis didn’t blame him, but Louis had spent a great deal of quiet thinking time the night before on this, so he plowed forward. Harry was wearing a grey plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway to the elbow. It looked tremendously old and soft

“As I said last night. I’ve been hearing this wolf but it’s hard for me to keep track of what’s happening in the real world, and what’s my fucked up, broken memories,” Louis said. “I only ever started remembering things when I met you--your pack,”  _ when I met you, the wolf in his heart prowled a perimeter of its own making, and the seasons never quite moved forward into spring, and now there's things growing out of the ground and they look suspiciously like flowers and what am I supposed to do with that?   
  
_ “Lottie helps,” Louis said. Harry smiled at that, a quick and flashed smile, uncertain of its place in having an opinion. It was nice though, and it warmed through Louis. He  _ wanted  _ Harry to wonder about Louis’ family, he wanted to tell Harry everything, he wanted to curl up in the sharp angle of Harry’s elbows and answer all the questions. 

_ Shut up,  _ Louis told the wolf, which never listened. 

“I want my telepathy to help, not hurt this,” Harry said. In the background, wolves were giving them a wide and polite distance, shoving luggage through slush. His mind said  _ please. _

“We can do this,” Louis said, and Harry bit his lower lip so hard it looked like it hurt, and Louis wasn’t sure why. 

“So rule,” Louis said, “You have to be ready to come with me if I need you, if I feel like I’m catching a thread of the signal. Even if you don’t feel like it.”   
  
“Oh, sure,” Harry said. “Of course.” 

“Rule,” Louis continued, looking at Harry steadily, because it was  _ fine,  _ it was, he had a quest, and quests required difficult things, and everyone could understand that. “I might have to touch you. Ok? So give me your hand if I ask. Just, don’t make a thing of it. Understand what it’s for.”

“Ok, of course,” Harry said, with the smallest strangle in his throat. Louis shrugged, and hoped it conveyed that he wasn’t trying to be an imposition, and that he was  _ sorry,  _ and he took another sugar cookie and put it in his pocket.

“Rule,” Louis said, “Tell the packs if I break, and stop me.” 

“What?” Harry interrupted him, so much for working on it. “I’m not gonna do that. There won’t be anything to stop.”    
  
“ _ Harry,”  _ Louis said, no, he  _ thought  _ it, and Harry caught his breath around the exhale of another word. Louis’ wolf wasn’t angry or scared. It was just intent, focused, concentrated. He could feel the telepathy shimmering forward like the smell of something really good, and he knew Harry could hear it. It was like briefly making a one-way mirror turn transparent, like he’d turned on the light behind it. 

_ I’m sorry, it has to be you. Lottie won’t stop me, and I won’t put this on her. The others don’t have this kind of telepathy. I don’t want to screw it up. I don’t want to put anyone else in danger, ever again. I don’t want to put this on you either but I don’t think it’s about me, is it.  _

He sent the dream into Harry’s mind, just the edge of it, just the vast, clattering loneliness and that thing that was always behind loneliness. Danger.  _ The rule is: if I start to mess it up, I can count on you to tell me. And stop me. Drag me out of the pack, throw me out of the telepathic plane. I know you can do it, because you’re the one who brought me in, in the first place. _

Harry took a long breath. He fumbled with the tupperware, but Louis was really only looking at his wide, sincere, warm eyes. Harry had such lovely eyes. 

“You aren’t going to mess it up,” Harry said.

“You don’t know that,” Louis said. “Wild wolves are more dangerous than anyone’s been telling me. But I’m not stupid.” 

“No one,” Harry breathed quietly, “Could  _ ever  _ think that.” 

Louis shifted. The train was starting to make grumbly machine noises, and steam was rising in the air. He remembered when travel meant very bad things, but it was fuzzy, getting replaced by the sense that he could step out and travel and yet never leave a thing owned by the pack around him. What a way it would have been to grow up. 

“If I shove into somebody’s brain and they’re not in a good place, I could break the whole--” there wasn’t really a hand gesture for  _ this magical telepathic plane that connects you all and basically forms the basis for your emotional stability as a pack.  _ Louis settled for a kind of cookie-crumb-scattering flutter. “If they don’t want me there. If they don’t  _ know  _ what it’s like to have another wolf around. If they want to hurt me, and us.” 

“They won’t do that. I won’t have to stop anything, or do anything. You didn’t want to hurt us,” Harry said, louder and bolder, and Louis was grateful for it because he needed  _ this  _ Harry back, the one that was full of feelings and conviction and fell over his own feet with it sometimes. The one who cared. 

But it was because of the caring that Louis smiled sadly at Harry while he took another cookie, cleaning out the tupperware. He figured he deserved it. “I didn’t  _ work  _ either, did I.”  _ Will you promise? If I’m not up for this, I want you to break me out of the plane. Disconnect me from the packs, from anyone. I don’t want to be the lightning rod for a broken wolf. _

He didn’t know how it worked, exactly. But he knew this was possible. If Louis linked to a wild wolf, Harry was going to have to be there on the other side like a barrier, a blocker to the rest of the path. It was behind the whole reason to reach back out to his pack at all. It was something that Louis had realized, somewhere in the midst of all the letters and the lessons from Lottie and the snippets he had tied together about telepathy, packs, himself.

And it was just, objectively, a shitty thing to have to ask someone to promise. Which was why Louis was asking it of Harry. It wasn’t, not exactly, that he had forgiven Harry for everything that had happened. It wasn’t that he thought that Harry would now be motivated by guilt. It was just that there was something between them now, a truth in the chill early spring air, like the mistakes and the rupture and the heartbreak and the letters had knit something together as much as torn something apart. Harry looked at him over the empty tupperware, still the first friendly face Louis had ever seen on a wolf’s territory.    
  


“I promise,” Harry said. “I promise to tell you the truth about what’s happening. I’ll be there. No matter what.” 

***

**H.**

They had a strategy session in the dining car, because it was also breakfast time for people who had not been up baking, like Harry. The train had already started heading north, because Louis had given that much sense of directionality to the mission. Up north, Gemma said, there were several possible cities and big, uncharted pockets of wolfish haunts, any number of which could match the descriptions of Louis’ dreams. 

The east pack train was  _ gorgeous.  _ It had wide, wide aisles with soft corners, suitable for anyone who wanted to travel in four legged, rather than two legged form. Niall and Zayn and Liam had holed up in the set of bunk cars at the far end, and there was a viewing car with wide glass windows up and down the sides instead of walls, and Harry had rather guiltily thrown his bags into a solitary room on the other side of the viewing car, far from anybody and anything. But everyone seemed to understand. 

Harry took a seat in the dining car and clutched a bowl of faintly damp oatmeal, microwaved into oblivion, which he had made more for something to do than because he was still hungry. 

Louis was rather carefully positioned leaning against the wall next to the trash can, which he was regarding with some fascination. The trash can was bolted into the wall and tucked under the counter and it had a very thick, smell-resistant lid, because wolf trains had wolf standards for heightened wolf senses.

“Brilliant bunks,” Gemma said appreciatively, hovering over pastries on the counter. “I am going to rip that design off,” 

“Do and we’ll have to battle on the next full moon,” Ed said casually from a corner booth, and they both laughed. Harry rolled his eyes, because east pack and inn pack had never been enemies at all, and were quickly becoming something like very important friends, but pack leaders were always  _ like this  _ anyway. 

“Six hours to the next town so today, a good day to kind of chill on the train, rest, let the wolf get ready. Could be a telepathic shock when we cross over to new wolf territory,” Gemma said, looking at Louis and then away, and Harry had been Gemma’s younger brother enough to know the feeling of her wanting to take care of somebody and holding herself back.

“Is the telepathic plane going to work the same?” Louis asked, curiously. 

“I have a survey for everyone to take every morning, because this is an excellent opportunity to study some interpack dynamics during transitional geographic--OOF--” Liam announced and then exclaimed, coming in with a stack of papers and pencil behind his ear. Lottie was with him--Harry realized, seeing them all together, that Liam was the one out of all of them who knew the east pack best, and it was funny to see Lottie had punched Liam a little with her elbow  _ exactly  _ where the inn pack would’ve too, if they hadn’t all been on the other side of the room. 

“Right on,” Harry said to Lottie over his terrible oatmeal. 

“Somebody had to,” Lottie smirked.

“Stop it heathens, no interest in data,” Liam said, rubbing his side. He put the papers on the counter and looked meaningfully at everybody. Harry saw Likert scales and as one with Niall, Zayn, and Gemma, gave a small wolf grumble. 

“I’ll fill out your survey,” Louis said from his lean on the wall. 

“Thank you,” Liam said with dignity. “And the telepathic plane  _ is  _ going to work with all of us together. Your wolf is always a wolf but on wolf territory--even new territory--it’ll still feel ok. Not forever. But you know, you’ll be in the woods.” 

Louis seemed to accept this, nodding, although Harry could see the little flash of humor in his eyes, under his intense brow, that seemed to say  _ all right, a lot of semantics to this fairy tale, aren’t there.  _

“We’ll get to the city, you’ll bing-bang magic-brain, and we’ll see if there’s a lost wolf there! We will be adventurers, we will return with even yet another friend, it will be delightful,” Niall said. He had taken up a perch on the corner booth with Ed. Underneath all of them, the train chugged steadily. Through the clear windows, the sun was coming in with tones of orange and gold, brightly marking out the shadows of trees from beyond the rail.   
  
"Yes, easy," Louis said sarcastically.   
  
"Easy," Harry said softly. 

"Nothing is actually easy," Louis said, and no one had anything to say to that. Louis had clenched his hand a little, and his mouth was a tight line, and Harry watched him force himself to relax it. 

“I won’t let you down,” Louis said, determinedly, his face sharp and white. Harry’s hands twitched on the table, but Lottie was already there. 

“You’re finding a  _ lost wolf,”  _ Lottie said, “That nobody else could hear. You’ve already not let anybody down.” 

“Seconded,” Zayn said softly. He’d come in and stood at the doorway, and he was holding one of Liam’s surveys, amazingly. Louis looked towards him and Harry could see the light it brought to Louis' face, and Zayn smiled at him.   
  
Harry shook his head. It was surprising all the way around, this new configuration they were finding themselves in, this grasping, gentle quest towards whatever they were doing, oriented around Louis and his conviction that someone else needed them. “We were all in our territories with all the magic of the packs, and  _ we  _ didn’t hear this lost wolf. It was you.” 

“Why does a wolf get lost in the first place?” Louis asked, looking at Zayn. “When we have the telepathy, and the packs are so connected. How can it happen that you have a pack and then the pack loses you?” 

It was possible that underneath this was  _ how could it have happened to me.  _ His heart hurt in his chest, and the morning light flickered on the silverware tucked into small, train-locked compartments. 

Zayn looked uncomfortable, and his fingers curled on the survey, but he answered. “Something would have to be wrong, you know. I didn't get lost by my pack, my pack was no longer there. When I lost my pack--” (Niall, Liam, Harry and Gemma all shifted a little, as one, the wolves in them would have wrestled their way to Zayn’s side, but for the warm reassurance they could see in his relaxed shoulders, that this was an old story, and a sad one, but with a happy ending--) “When  _ I  _ got lost, there was a moment I was disconnected from the plane. It can be a defensive thing you know, but the wolf doesn’t like it at all. Liam thinks it’s something like an acute, what--” 

“Acute defensive response,” Liam said, a little bit of Doctor Steve in his voice. 

“Right, acute defensive, like, not supposed to happen for a long time but good for an emergency. You know, when you’re like a small cub and you’re trained to become quiet, invisible, sink into the snow.” 

“Medieval. That’s stuff we haven’t had to worry about for like _eight hundred years, _before there were full wolf economies and big old territories and all the humans left us alone and everything was great,” Niall said sniffily, the packborn certainty in his rising a little. Harry flicked a tiny bit of oatmeal his way. 

“Let Zayn finish,” Gemma snapped. 

“Ok but it’s there isn’t it? Acute defensive response that can still kick in, the thing about it is the wolf has to  _ give up, _ ” Zayn said intently. It was a bit like watching a conversation that was only meant for him, and Louis, and Lottie, the three of them who had had something precious and important wrested away, and nothing about that was ever going to be  _ fair.  _

“I think I get it,” Louis said. The sun outlined in the ends of his hair, which Harry noticed was getting a little long behind his ears, in a way that suddenly sent a little shiver of want through Harry’s entire frame, a strange, intimate thing to notice. 

“And I think I have a guess why you can feel the wolf out there,” Zayn said. “You’re the one who’s been off the plane. You’re the one who hasn’t picked a pack. You’re like them, you know, a little. I feel like it’s an echo for me or something, a dream. But you can walk into the dream.”   
  
"I can," Louis said, "And I know what it is like to not be a friendly wolf." They were silent at that, caught around the bigness of it, and Harry thought about the secret hurts that Louis had shared back when Louis trusted him, and he was struck again with something like a crystal-sharp sadness that he hadn't held them better, and understood them more. Harry might still feel guilty for that mistake but Louis was an expert of guilt, had lived in it like a second skin. 

“The thing I can’t do is convince the wolf that packs are still a thing,” Louis said bluntly, “Not being a pack member. I’m like a radio, connected to nothing but an empty room. So if I can find them, someone has to be in the room.” 

Niall had his chin rested in his hands, Liam looked like he’d been given the keys to the forbidden section of a library, Ed looked a little seasick, and Gemma had her pack lead look on, the one that said  _ I have no idea but I’ll jump in front of this train if it helps.  _ Lottie simply looked like Louis--sharp, fierce, relentlessly compassionate. 

“The wolves will know what to do,” Harry said, “Far away from territory, strange wolf, dangerous, our two different packs and all our differences, etcetera, I don’t care. We’ll run together and we’ll figure it out. It’s what packs do. It’s what we’ll do. We’ll be there, Louis will find them, and we can trust you, you know. Knowing about the dangerous things that can happen isn't a weakness, it's, it's important.”  
  
There was silence again--but warm this time, filled in underneath by the clicking rails, and Louis' silver-gold telepathy was suddenly _there, _brushing up against Harry's mind in a tentative blink, so quickly that Harry thought he might have imagined it. It felt like something grateful. Harry closed his eyes briefly, the wolf in his chest still, and heavy.

“And additionally if you hurt him,” Lottie said airily, looking toward Gemma and Harry specifically but also looking in a diffuse way by proxy at every single wolf in the entire world, “I will end you.” 

Silence hung in the small cabin. Louis was clearly trying very hard not to move, and his entire face flushed. Lottie’s small strong arm was around his waist.

It was Zayn who broke the tension. “Good,” he said. He was smiling. Louis dared a glance at Harry, and Harry felt like he was still a decade away from smiling but he nodded. 

“Same, obviously,” Liam said, with a practicality that made it sound like he was talking about picking something up from the store. 

“Lottie will clearly get you first, but I’ll take afters,” Niall said.

"If someone or something decides to threaten Louis on this trip I will beat every single one of you to ripping out their throat," Gemma said pleasantly. 

"Oh, you just try it," Lottie said, and the two of them suddenly grinned across the space between them like a mysterious, sisterly alliance had been discovered.

"Terrifying," Niall remarked, appreciatively. “Shall we all fill our surveys?” 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> there are probably mistakes in here due to the excessive partying of this weekend!!!!! I will attempt to come out and fix them later but for now I am just throwing exuberant words into the universe. NO REGRETS

**H. **  
  
Harry had always had great telepathy. It was a thing that the other wolves could say about him, along with “lovely singing voice” and “tall enough to reach the alternative flours on the highest kitchen shelf.” It wasn’t something that he’d ever thought of as _ different, _ just nice_. _ Since meeting Louis and then messing everything up with Louis, Harry had thought a lot about what made people feel different, set apart, and alone. And he’d thought a lot about all of the invisible buoys he’d grown up with--safeguards and supports he hadn’t even seen that kept him from ever having that feeling. Presumption that he would always be accepted, certainty that he was unique only in a nonthreatening way, a way that brought compliments instead of rejection. It made him grateful. It made him sad. It made him feel grateful-sad, the feeling of coming over a new horizon, of running to the end of his own stamina, of seeing that there would always be _ more. _

For a packborn wolf, great telepathy meant “able to send a message to the far end of the forest” and “generally pleasantly clear voice on a full moon.” It did not mean the kinds of things that Louis could do, and now, the things had been happening even for Harry since he’d met and lost and then somehow, maybe, possibly regained him. These new things included the flashes of Louis’ mind while in human form, the growing sensation of the boundaries of their territory being more of a suggestion than a hard stopping place. And apparently, they included waking up with someone else’s dreams in his head. 

Harry had gone to bed a human but he woke up a wolf. It took an instant to process--but the wolf was Harry’s other half, his second self, so it wasn’t frightening as much as comforting. Wolves were generally better at life, in Harry’s opinion. The wolf yawned, with animal satisfaction, and the yawn brought in information from the window, the stars above, the trees spreading out around the train. His four limbs were tangled up in a wide bunk bed, his long head was curled into his pillow, and what he lost in human height and frontal cortex-present processing, the wolf made up for in secondary processing, wide and broad, the rush in of other senses and the calm instincts toward comfort. 

Someone was out and about, roaming. Harry knew who it was. Nobody else smelled quite like that, black tea, watchfulness, sweetness that hide underneath all of it. 

Harry jumped out of the bed, narrowly missing skimming a hind leg on the small train sink that was bolted to the wall with some pipes running down to the water system. He wrinkled his nose and went out in search of the person who’d invaded his head. 

***

**L. **

The train was dark in the middle of the night, as dark as running through the underbrush, with flickers coming at regular intervals through the windows. The wolf inside of Louis loved it. It was a realm of smells and touches, which made a lot more sense to the wolf than words and concepts. Louis trailed a hand down the side of the passageway to the dining car, rather than turn on any of the guiding lights. He made his way to the viewing car, which was plated all over in glass and rather magnificent. 

He curled up on a long, wide bench that faced the side of the train and looked up at the stars. The bench was cold under his bare feet. They had spent the day playing board games, and Louis had read, and it had been nice. He should be sleeping like everyone else was, but he was cold in his solitary train bunk and the wolf was _ tired _in a way that begged for community. 

_ Community, _ Louis told his wolf sternly, _ is something we used to be so goddamn good at avoiding. _

It was back to being chilly. It was going to be chilly at night in this part of the world, Louis guessed, until nearly the highest point of summer, and they were only at the beginning of spring. Louis felt sleep-deprived and not as cold as he used to be, but his wolf wasn’t yet the temperature-running, fantastical monster that everyone else’s seemed to be. 

Speaking of fantastical monsters, the viewing car wasn’t empty anymore. There was something big, and silent, and _ strong _in the doorway. It cast a deeper shadow into the grey-black of the hallway. 

Louis’s shoulders stiffened automatically, the hairs on the back of his neck standing up, the molars aching in his jaw, like they were ready to lengthen just in case he needed them. Part of him was still human, he supposed, part him felt the fragile nature of his tissues. He didn’t look over, deliberately, tucking his bare feet further underneath himself instead.

“Hullo, wolf Harry,” Louis said. 

It _ was _Harry. Louis kept his own mind squarely in the borders of his skull, but he could tell without really looking. What other wolf could look that sweetly repentant, crossing the train car and leaping onto the wide, deep bench so close to Louis that Louis could smell the toothpaste-pine-cone smell of Harry’s wolf mouth. 

“You once told me our mouths get clean on their own, benefits of werewolf attributes,” Louis said, “I am trusting that you weren’t just having me on.” 

Harry made a snuffling noise, a tiny huff of hair through his nose. Louis finally turned around and looked at him. The wolf eyes were flecked with magically lovely colors, richer and denser than human eyes, capable of seeing more in the dark. 

“Why are _ you _ here,” Louis said. And then he thought it. He knew that he shouldn’t, but there was something about Harry, wolfish, that was paradoxically vulnerable. There was nothing duplicitous and socially performative about the wolf. Wolves just wanted things to _ work. Did you come out just to bake something? _

_ Worried, _ Harry thought back simply, his wolf’s mind a little clearer, a little bigger in its concepts, and a hell of a lot less prone to embarrassment than his human side. _ Don’t let me make it worse though. Nice stars too. _

Louis sighed. Wanting to crush himself into Harry’s arms didn’t negate the fact that he thought maybe if he did, he would break apart in pieces. Louis had been broken so many times before by so many things in life--small things and big things and the unending grind of loneliness that had been the background of everything for so long. He didn’t know how to fit _ this _ into the scenery of _ that. _

But he was cold. “Come here,” Louis said, because it was the middle of the night, and if all of this was possibly temporary, for Louis, how would he survive the rest of his life if he didn’t, once in a while, break the rules? 

The wolf scooted closer on the bench, a ridiculous movement that looked _ very _Harry. Louis readjusted to a cross-legged position, and Harry laid his head in Louis’ lap, slow at first, and then deliberately over Louis’ knee and thigh, his thick fur feeling kind of like a blanket. 

_ Bad dreams, _ Harry thought, sounding sad. _ Didn’t know they were so bad. _

“Oh,” Louis said. “You too?” The wolf gave a big, doglike sigh. Louis thought, _ move if this isn’t ok, _and Harry huffed a small growl that sounded like an eyeroll. Louis put his fingers on the thick fur of Harry’s neck. It was impossibly soft, long fur that you could wrap your fingers in and lose your hand in. 

The warmth swam through him. This was hideously unfair. 

“It’s not that bad,” Louis said, “Because I get to wake up to something so much better. Everything is still so much better than it ever was, Hazz, you don’t need to worry. And we aren’t going to let that dream happen.” 

The dream had been about the strange wolf. It had also been about Louis, somehow, the snapping vicious anger that Louis remembered from the hallway of the care home, the past that he still found difficult to think about. He let himself breath, and looked up at the stars, resting the back of his head on the bench and soaking in the warm heat of Harry’s wolf body. They stayed like that for a very long time. 

***

**H. **

Harry chewed over the memory of the dream while he soaked in the deep, guilty wonderfulness of getting to be closer to Louis once again. 

The dream had been about the strange wolf. It had also been about Harry, somehow, the shivering and real fear of a future where Harry let Louis down, and they found the strange wolf, and the strange wolf--lost, misunderstood, something feral and uncontrolled--attacked. And Harry failed to stop it. In the dream, they had been standing in the dark of an abandoned building confronting the wolf. Louis had been walking forward, small, sharp, tight shoulders and intention. He was never going to stop, and Harry had been reaching for him, and he hadn’t been able to move his feet from the floor. And then the wolf had _ moved. _

Had they had the same dream, or just shared the beginning? Harry hoped that Louis hadn’t seen that kind of ending.

“It’s not that bad,” Louis said, like he knew what Harry was thinking. “Because I get to wake up to something so much better. Everything is still so much better than it ever was, Hazz, you don’t need to worry.” 

This, Harry thought, was exactly the kind of thing he had needed to learn about _ difference. _ The things that caught Harry in the teeth, the things that felt like a gut punch, those were _ every day _for Louis, and even living in a pack he didn’t quite belong to with just one family member...Harry sighed. He had to let Louis define what it was, not his own assumptions. 

“And we aren’t going to let that dream happen,” Louis said. 

Harry was _ done _making his own mistakes the center of the story. He chewed, instead, on the feeling in the dream that he was sure had come directly from Louis’ telepathy. It was something about failure, he knew, something that his own part of the telepathy had translated to himself. But there was an edge to it, a thing asking a question. 

Louis laid his head back on the bench, and Harry could feel the muscles in his thigh unwind, pooling into the warmth that Harry’s wolf could offer. It felt guilty, wonderful, aching, and Harry tried extremely hard not to move. They stayed like that for a very long time. 

“Besides,” Louis whispered. Harry had thought maybe he was asleep--his eyes were closed and his breathing was heavy, his small, cold hand getting warmer under Harry’s fur-- “When it breaks, I’m going to take it, you know. I can take it. I’ll take it far away from everybody.” 

Harry didn’t make the choice to transform so much as the choice was made for him, his wolf jumping up, irritated, and his mind jumping through vague wolf words fast enough for his brain to say, _ no, wait, need all the good vocabulary for this one. _He ended up sprawled on the floor, morphing back through muscle and bone. 

Louis had jumped and then covered his face with his hands, polite even through surprise. “For fuck’s sake, Harry,” he started.

“Wait,” Harry snapped, “_ Wait,” _he jolted up onto human feet (stupid, unstable), and went for the train car corner that had a heavy case full of backup clothes. 

“I’m decent,” Harry said when he’d pulled on sweatpants and a hoodie for good measure, because it seemed bad form to have a fight with your not-boyfriend-lost-friend in the middle of a starlight night without a shirt on. He crossed his arms and glared until Louis lowered his hands, looking confused. 

“What is your problem,” Louis said, but softly, “I was being _ nice--” _

“Are you planning to leave?” Harry asked bluntly, “When we find the strange wolf? Do you not think this is going work? Are you planning to _ leave the wolves? _Is that what the rules were about? I thought you were just making sure. You’re so careful, you always want to think of every option. But you think it’s going to happen, don’t you.” 

Louis looked at him. He was small and undoubtedly getting cold again, and Harry was upset, but on the other hand, it was all clicking in, and making a certain kind of sense. 

So Harry asked, instead of demanding. He was resolved to not make the mistakes he’d made before, assuming that he _ did _understand. 

“Just tell me,” Harry said, “Tell me more about this. This is important, Louis, and I want to know.” 

Louis shifted on the bench, his face so many emotions that he wasn’t going to let himself say. Harry could taste the edge of his telepathy on the air, so, so bittersweet. 

“Why would you go into all of this assuming it will fail?” Harry asked. “Because I don’t think it’ll fail. I don’t think _ you _will fail.” 

Louis looked down. “You don’t know that,” he said. 

“Of course I don’t,” Harry said, “It’s called faith. Louis, tell me, after every single thing you’ve learned about all the things you were right with--finding us, your telepathy, the dreams, the fact that _ someone is out there and you can help them, _why are you determined to be wrong?” 

“I’m trying to protect the pack,” Louis started, the wall coming down on his face, and maybe they weren’t pack, and maybe Louis wasn’t telling him where they stood and maybe Harry hadn’t really truly made it all up to him yet, but Harry still knew _ that _wasn’t right. 

“Are you trying to protect the pack or are you trying to protect yourself?” 

***

**L. **

Louis stood up off the bench, a shaking, wolfish energy animating his limbs. Something in the way that Harry had said that had shot through him, right into his tender heart, past all of the walls he had thought he was still so good at. “I hate this,” he said.

“Right,” Harry said, sharp and almost angry, and then immediately his face twisted in regret, at the same time as Louis jammed his elbow on the train window, startlin at the tone. His wolf was still a creature trained for menace. 

Louis could hear the instant apology as Harry thought it, _ not like that, I'm not mad at you, never-- _ the rippling certainty of Harry’s conviction that _ Louis _ hadn’t done anything wrong was startling, and pure. Louis blinked, his eyes feeling suspiciously teary. Why was it suddenly so immense, and so _ difficult? _

“I’m sorry,” Harry said, “I’m sorry.” He visibly kept himself from saying _ sorry _ one more time, and Louis was grateful because Louis didn’t exactly have it in himself to give it the eyeroll it deserved. He was so tired of people saying _ sorry. _

“I didn’t mean you--” Louis started at the same time as Harry said, “I didn’t mean--” and they both paused, a beat of awkwardness and hesitation quick enough for them both to laugh, just a little.

Harry waited, and then he said, “What if you didn’t have to work so hard to protect the world from yourself all the time?” 

“I don’t know,” Louis said, which was the moon-honest truth, “I would be a different person, maybe, and I don’t know if I could take another goddamn increase to that.” 

“Different isn’t bad,” Harry said. 

The world rushed by in blackness outside the window. It was so _ much _ and so _ big _and Louis was, maybe, just tired of holding onto everything so tightly. His jaw ached with longing, his bare feet were cold on the floor, and he could feel the vibrations of the tracks underneath them all. 

“Different is the best thing that ever happened to me,” Harry said. “Different is _ beautiful.” _

Louis stepped forward. His elbow was still ringing from knocking it into the train wall. He could feel the awareness of it in Harry’s mind. He didn’t want to look at the telepathy that was still streaming at him, but he’d been given permission anyway, so he did. Before all the complexity and the worry and the learning about himself, he had just been Louis--alone with a bag on a cold night, looking for somewhere to sleep. 

_ Harry had seen Louis come into the inn, saw the sharp survival movement in his footsteps, saw the fierce clench of his jaw and the dark wolf inside. And he’d said, do you want cookies? _

“I am so tired of worrying about everything, all the time,” Louis said, stepping forward. “It’s not your fault. It’s not my fault. But it still _ is. _ I don't like _ this.” _He gestured at the air between them. He bit his lower lip, hard. He could smell train in the air, metal and moving, like some kind of mythical dragon hurtling forward on the tracks.

“Really?” Harry asked softly. 

"I don't like that I still want to talk to all of you," Louis said swiftly, unable to stop it. And then, quieter-- “And that-- that I have to miss you. I hate how much I have to miss you. I don’t feel like I forgive you and I still fucking miss you.” 

Harry was so still he was hardly breathing. Louis could feel the wanting and feel the way Harry was holding it back. It made him feel oddly, terribly emotional. 

"I'm here now," Harry said. It was a little choked. He was really terribly lovely, salt and vanilla and boy, big eyes in the dark and a face that Louis could remember the feeling of. He was still mad but he also wondered whether he even cared that Harry had been in his mind. 

"I want to be here," Harry said. 

_ The way that Harry saw him was vivid, more vivid than life. It was a gift and a curse, to see things the way that Harry saw them. Everything like a movie set. Lit perfectly from the side. Obscuring things. Fantastical, dramatic. But beautiful. _

Harry’s mind was there, just like the train was there, it was warm and unmissable. It was a lantern in the window and Louis felt his mind wander toward it, always.

_ You, us, what happened, it's distracting me from this very important quest we’re on, _he shot through the dark. It was supposed to be angry but Louis had very little experience expressing that sort of thing and he knew as soon as he’d done it that Harry’s wolf wasn’t going to miss the longing in it.

Harry caught his breath. Louis could still feel that he was afraid of saying anything on the mental plane, afraid of broaching it, afraid of breaking their strange truce. 

_ I know, _Harry thought. Louis could feel his marvel at being able to do this in human form at all and it made him feel special, made his heart fritter in his chest. What if, as Lottie kept saying, his head wasn't broken, it was special. He had a flash of triumph at the feeling.

_ It isn't like I meant for any of this, _ Louis thought in a rush. He never would've gotten it through in words but telepathy conveyed a thousand layers at once. _ Didn't mean to be different. Didn't mean to be in your head. _

_ Neither did I, but I know it was awful, _ Harry thought. _ It can still have been an awful thing. _

It was like having someone living in your house without knowing it. Louis, who had been alone for so long that it defined him, shuddered. 

Harry looked incredibly sad. _ I know, _he thought back like a whisper, a thought that was left in the air between them. Louis could almost see his wolf slink down, show its throat. Even in this Harry was more brave than weak, more open hearted than Louis had ever been able to be. Louis didn't know why it made his heart pound, didn't know how to reconcile the cutting fear of being lied to with the dense, thick longing to be closer. He wanted to touch Harry again. He wanted to seal up a wall between them that would never be open again. He wanted things that he didn't even have words for. 

_ I really fucked us up, _ Harry thought. It was devastatingly unabashed. _ And here's why. Because I was stupid and self-centered and everyone's always given me the benefit of the doubt and I've gotten away with just taking things. Never because I wanted to control you. Not because I didn't care. Just because I thought I knew better, which isn't at all an excuse. It's just an explanation. I never, ever wanted to take anything from you. _

Louis felt dizzy, the rattle of the train in his ears. Harry was watching him and Louis had the inexpressible feeling of it from their mental link. Like the way you'd look at something on the wall in a museum, priceless and untouchable.

Harry sighed. 

_ But I realize that I did. I took a choice from you. _

Louis sucked in air. He had stumbled backwards without thinking, a wolf thrash. It wasn't because it disagreed, but because this was _ right. _Louis shook his head and felt his eyes filling with stupid goddamn tears again. He scrubbed his face with his sleeve. 

_ Choice, all the kids on the street knew, was just a word for something in a fairytale. Louis had never had that. _

"You have a choice now," Harry said, "Over absolutely everything. Always. You can choose to believe in yourself, I really think you can. Not for me or the pack or even Lottie, just because it’s something that they didn’t give you before, but you can give it to yourself."

There were definitely tears on Louis’ face. He could feel them, cold, on his cheek. There was something magnificent and alarmingly true in what Harry was saying in his head, and yet also the wolf in Louis’ chest just wanted to curl into a bed somewhere forever. For so, so long. 

_ I can’t do everything at once, _ Louis thought, _ not find the wolf, and act like a human at the table, and remember how to use a phone when I’ve never had one, and remember how to not say things that make people think I’m dumb and lost and weird, and MISS YOU, and not do something absolutely stupid like try to hold your hand, and not break the pack. And this whole--whatever you’re saying about believing in myself. I can’t do it all at once. _

Harry tilted his head to the side. It looked like something new was occurring to him. It felt like a tentative bridge in the dark space of a silent train car that neither of them had planned to be on. “You do know that you don’t have to be the one to fix everything, right?" 

“Oh, _ now _you want to use words? We don't have to use words," Louis said, a cheating way out.

Harry knew it. "I think some things need words," he said bravely. "I think it's like, I've learned that forcing yourself to put words to things is like a promise. You don't have to fix this." 

“How else does anything ever get fixed?” Louis asked, frustrated all over again, unsure what Harry even meant. He stepped a little bit closer, because he wanted to, because it was cold, because Harry pulled at him like something worrying at the end of a string, because he wanted to and he was just so tired of not doing what he wanted. He watched Harry watch him, not moving, but not because he didn’t want to as well.

"Other people fix it," Harry said softly, intensely, like he thought this was vital. "Louis. _ Of course _you can’t do everything. Do you think you have to? Do you really think you can’t just be yourself? And you know who will be there to help pick up the pieces. Other people. Like us. Your pack, we fix it when we mess it up." 

Louis didn't think Harry even noticed that he'd called the pack Louis', but he didn’t point it out. Sometimes moments felt like they rose up around Louis--Lottie on the train station, Harry behind the desk of the inn. Moments that carried more than other moments, deep-rooted moments pulling into the core of what Louis thought could happen next. Another path in the dark woods, left, or right. Louis felt the cold train air around them and heard the hum of the tracks. _ This is a moment, _ he thought, the idea that _ other people _might be the ones to fix it, and that he could just...feel however he felt. 

He missed Harry, and he missed the pack. Maybe he was allowed to have all of that at once, all the feelings and the unfollowed threads and the not-fixed things.

“I didn’t mean to snap,” Harry continued, “It wasn’t about you. It’s never about you. I'm frustrated with _ me. _ I'm upset that I was such an idiot about you and then about how I was even an idiot, like--like a layer cake of idiot."

That was unexpected and it pulled a quiet strange laugh out of Louis. "A _ layer cake," _he said, "Those big things in weddings?" He'd seen them on TV, and on the cover of magazines. 

"You could also make them for birthdays," Harry said.

"Birthdays, what," Louis said skeptically, and Harry frowned in mild, distracted indignation.

"You know, like a big summer party in a tent, you might want a nice layer cake for the impact," Harry protested. 

"I haven't been much for the big tent parties," Louis shot back.

Harry looked at him, helplessly smiling, mildly confused, “We’ll solve this later,” Harry said, and they were both laughing just a little. 

Harry leaned forward. He looked _ certain. _ “Louis,” he said, “I can feel how sad you are. Let it go. Please, not for me. For you. Let _ me _be sad about the ways that I broke your trust. You don’t have to worry about it, you don’t have to monitor it. You just get to be.” 

He was closer now, coming up to the window that Louis was still leaning against, and Louis could see Harry’s breath fog onto the window, could see the starlight in his eyes, more human than wolf this time. 

"I’m not trying to be this difficult," Louis said, "I’ve had a long time to think about what happened with us. And yeah, maybe I’m still pissed that you didn’t trust me enough to tell me that I was different. But I heard the stories about the other lost wolves and I can see how much the pack--I know it’s hard. I don’t know what to do with my own mind, I don’t know why you would. You really--just, you don't have to--"

"I think maybe I do," Harry said, watching him closely with an expression that was just a little sad. "I think I have to carry this along for a bit and you should just let me. Don't think about it. You have so many more important things to think about. Let _ me _feel bad about what happened with us." 

“Maybe we both need to let it go,” Louis said. It was a sad sentence that he choked out reluctantly, his tongue feeling heavy. “Maybe we both just need to admit how little I ever fit in the inn.” 

"But _ that's _ not true," Harry exclaimed. "Maybe I was an ass but you know, you know none of that is true. It's not true that you never fit. You’re special, but we’re special too, you know? Wasn’t the inn the first place you really let yourself be yourself?"

"Stop it. It's not true that I'm special," Louis protested, scrubbing a hand across his face, because after all, how much worse could this conversation possibly get? It hurt, to talk about the inn, to talk about it like it was a _ possibility _ to go back to everything that he’d only glimpsed before. He already felt like he’d cracked the wall around his telepathy with Harry, thoughts leaking out and what was worse, so many _ feelings. _ This was the core and the heart of it. That maybe he was going to let everyone down, and worse--that he wasn’t going to be able to save this stranger, this new lost wolf who deserved so much more.

"Bullshit," Harry said. 

Louis took in a deep breath. It was headying, stupid, but he wanted to smell Harry, wanted every bit of the warm and rich air between them, this small train car hurtling through darkness toward something that was pulling him, and Louis didn’t know _ who _ or _ what _ he was and it was all so fucking complicated and he _ wanted. _

Louis stepped forward and Harry watched him, something rising up in his face that was uninterpretable without prying, even with the rush of Harry’s telepathy in Louis’ ears, like a never-ending stream. Louis wondered if this was him getting better, or Harry no longer trying to control it, the thoughts around them in a flickering gold thread, not so overwhelming and more beautiful. 

“You don’t even believe that,” Harry said. “You are literally _ thinking at me _that you don’t mean it.” 

“Why are you so impossible,” Louis said, “I am trying to get a handle on the bullshit mind magic but I don’t know how. I am trying to disentangle it and when you’re around, I can’t. Why are you always _ pushing?” _

Harry tilted his head, wolfish. The extremely awake wolf in Louis’ chest wanted to transform then and there. _ Everything is easier when you’re on four paws, _ something grumbled in his head, and then there was the image of it just being _ ok _ to snap and the marvelous cleansing properties of a mock fight. Harry’s wolf was big, and strong, and experienced, but Louis’ wolf was fast and smart and fucking _ mad. _

“So everything is complicated and ridiculous and stupid and we don’t know how to fix it. Do you miss me?” Harry asked, eyes gleaming in the flickering lights that streamed past the train window. Louis could smell the metal of the tracks, could feel the cold draft seeping from the outside, could feel the twitch in his fingers toward Harry. And his mind said, _ it’s a lot of things but not all of those things are bad. _

“What did you say?” Louis asked, dangerously. 

“Go on,” Harry said, teeth bared, kind of a smile? Kind of a laugh? Kind of a _ challenge? _ “Do you miss me? Pretty sure that’s what I heard. Maybe that’s something to forward on with, here. Because I miss you. And I know I fucked it all up like an idiot but I _ care. _ I care about you. I miss you. I want you to come back to us. If you want to. You don’t have to, but you can have it. You don’t need to _ fix _this telepathy. You can have the inside of my head.” 

_ Harry had never met a thing in the woods that ever scared him. And Louis was no exception. _Louis caught his breath around the solid core of truth that he could feel. There was nothing like Harry’s certainty. 

They were so different, he couldn’t have _ designed _ them more different lives, and yet there was something that interlocked between their perfect difference, like the opposite poles of a rotating sphere, not separate at all, but necessarily connected. The trees outside the train windows turned into a blur as the train went faster. He could sense it, the woods getting deeper and more wild as they went further north, the wolf wanting less and less to do with the surface absurdities of human relationships. _ Push, _Louis’ wolf said, it wanted to fix things in the dirt, and the snow, and the gravel. 

So Louis pushed. He stepped forward in the narrow train car and felt the rough fabric of Harry’s hoodie against his hands, and he _ pushed. _Harry stumbled backward, and found his footing, came back with his eyes flashing a challenge. 

“I don’t know how I got tangled up in all of you. I never asked for any of it, never asked to be this way, or have so much to solve, and now on top of that I have to _ miss you,” _Louis hissed. He could feel Harry’s breathing like it was his own. Harry grabbed into the close soft wool of Louis’ pajama shirt and Louis felt caught, even though Harry was the one with his back to the train window. 

He was mad, and he didn't know how to say it, and he missed them at the same time, and Harry wasn't backing away, or looking shocked, or sick with it. Harry looked _ pleased. _

“How do you think _ I _feel,” Harry said, mouth against Louis’ ear. His jaw was absurd. Louis hated it. He wanted to feel it out with his fingers and push the scruff of it into his own skin. He didn’t understand himself. He pushed Harry into the wall, and Harry pushed back. 

“I don’t know,” Louis said. 

“Well just read my mind,” Harry said, “Use your specialness.” 

“I don’t have _ specialness,” _ Louis snarled, but it wasn’t at Harry, and Harry knew it because the thrust of the mental telepathy had shimmed straight from Louis’ wolf and into Harry’s. _ Want, missing, pack, lost, _all of those delicate strands exploding into a feeling so big that Louis didn’t know if he would ever reach the bottom. He flexed his fingers, not claws but close enough.

"I don't want to be like this," Louis said, "And I'm so, so mad about it." 

“You should be mad,” Harry said, "You deserve that," and kissed him. 

For their third kiss ever, and for a kiss in the middle of the night at the height of an argument that Louis didn’t even feel like he was following, it was spectacular. It was a chaos of heat and spark, all of his attention whittling down to the connection between them. He kissed back immediately, grabbing Harry’s arms, grabbing into the front of his loose hoodie, clawing at him. He bit Harry’s lower lip and Harry growled deep in his throat involuntarily, appreciatively, and Louis felt the shudder of the train under their feet and the tremble in his own hands. _ This is stupid, but I want all of it, I want so much, I want you, touch me, _he thought, before he remembered that Harry could read his mind when Louis wanted him to, and Louis wanted him to. 

Harry wrapped his arms around Louis, hands gripping into the back of Louis’ pajama shirt, which was made warmer by the press of Harry’s body. Harry kissed him again, like a challenge, not so gentle as Louis remembered, and Louis met it with an antagonizing push that melted into something stupidly like gentleness as Harry sank back into the train window. Harry’s fingers were curled into Louis’ hair. 

“Are you ok?” Harry whispered. He sounded like someone waking up in the middle of the night. Louis’ telepathy brushed against Harry’s and he pulled it back, because he didn’t want to _ cheat _at this, because he didn't know how to move forward past the ways they'd already confused it all. And he marveled at his own ability to do it, something that would’ve been impossible just a few weeks before. 

“I’m fine,” Louis said. 

Maybe change was possible. For now, he was _ tired _of the telepathy, the strange landscape of his mind, and he could feel the pulse of his heartbeat in his ears and he couldn’t stop how very much he wanted someone to feel that, too. He pushed his palms against Harry, weighting himself down with the feedback of something real. 

Harry touched the sides of his face, traced the soft skin that went from his ear down to his jaw. Louis ached with the rareness of this feeling. When had anyone ever touched his face before?

“What are we doing,” Harry whispered, an inch from Louis’ face and yet Louis managed not to look at him. A lifetime of being alone carried its own gifts, sometimes. 

“I don’t know, not fixing everything,” Louis whispered back. Harry laughed a little bit, tentatively, but joyful. Harry wasn’t letting go of Louis and Louis wasn’t stepping away. Harry put his other hand up against the back of Louis’ shoulderblades, tracing their bend, and Louis shivered. He could feel the shape of himself in Harry’s mind because Harry was letting him. 

“I’ve missed you all the time, all I’ve wanted is to somehow get you back,” Harry said, and Louis _ knew this _but it still shuddered through him like the train wheels against the tracks. 

“In a good way,” Harry added, like someone who had been reading a lot of self-help books, “In a healthy way.” 

He was so sweetly absurd, so many things, challenging and endearing and just goddamn impossible to forget. Louis closed his eyes kissed him again. It was stupid, but he had to. He couldn’t have told anyone why. He felt Harry's teeth catch on his lower lip, experimental and then hard, but only hard enough to feel like a question, not hard enough to hurt. This was a kind of feeling that Louis could not have known he'd wanted until feeling it, and having felt it, it was everything. Louis gasped, mouth falling open more. It seemed like Harry took this as an encouragement because he pulled Louis closer and dug his fingers into him, moving fretfully around but never letting go. 

Louis felt weak, the touch overwhelming.

It wasn’t like it had been at Christmas—the first time he'd kissed Harry, which had been like falling through the ice into the pond but finding it hot, almost too hot to bear. This time, Louis had had months now to live in his own body, casual touches over breakfast, hugs over tea. He didn’t feel the same as he’d felt the first times Harry had ever touched him—like he might crumble under it. He could push back, he could feel _ Harry _tremble with the force of it, he could feel them both sway into the reassurance of the train wall. 

But _ this kind of feeling, _the pin pricks of static with every brush, the pushing magnetic pull under his own skin; this feeling was such a strange thing for his life and so very, exquisitely real, like a telescope narrowing his vision and extending it at the same time. He had only had it a few, rare times before. It was like breathing in a new kind of oxygen and he couldn't get enough of it. He pushed closer, their legs pressed up against each other. Louis could feel the jump of Harry’s pulse with his wolf sense. And he could feel Harry’s hesitation, and desire to go further. 

“Please,” he said, to the train and the universe and the dark, dark night. And to Harry, the person that he kept wanting, even though he was so, incredibly angry with him.

“Don’t say that,” Harry whispered brokenly. His hand was back in Louis’ hair. Louis had found himself turned into the train wall, maybe he had pulled himself there, curled in between metal and the warm press of Harry’s body. His own body wanted this warmth, the tender pain of it. 

“Why not,” Louis said. He was so tired of not doing things.

"Because," Harry said. Louis felt the presence of his mind and traced it with his own telepathy. It was strangely tender this way: Harry was bright, still, full of feelings and imperfections and kindness, suffused with regret that tangled up with a vivid _ want _so real that it made Louis blush up through the roots of his hair.

Harry ran fingertips over Louis' shoulder, not quite to his neck. It was so, unbearably gentle. Harry looked pale and determined. "Because I'm going to put in the work here. I'm going to figure out what it means for someone else to fix something for you."

"I don't know what that means," Louis said.

"You don't have to," Harry said. "You should just be." 

And before Louis could tell him that this was the _ worst, _ the _ least _helpful answer to the ice-fragile tension between them, Harry vanished down the dark hallway. Louis was left alone with his thoughts.


End file.
